Ours is not an empty, disorderly world, but an exquisitely structured web whose design embraces and affects all living things.

–Sally Goerner

WESTERN CIVILIZATION could be considered a grand experiment, culminating in the three-plus centuries of the industrial revolution, to see if the universe could be accounted for without resorting to the concept of a Supreme Being or an overall purpose.  The experiment was a huge success.  It proved without a doubt that the universe can not be accounted for without introducing the concept of purpose; life could not have come about by chance — as Ervin Lazlo puts it, “pure chance…does not appear to be a significant factor in the evolution of life;” the human being cannot be described as a separate, finite, physical fragment doomed to compete for diminishing resources, but a (potentially) conscious actor in the fulfillment of the design that biologist Sally Goerner alludes to above.

If the physical universe were not governed by laws, science would not be possible; in the same way, if there were not laws governing the spiritual universe within human nature (and all nature), great mystics like Jesus, the Buddha, and in our own age Mahatma Gandhi would not have been able to make their tremendous discoveries or, if they did, to communicate them to the rest of humanity.

The existence of these spiritual laws is what enabled Gandhi to say, in 1909 when his movement was at a low ebb and his opponents determined to not yield one inch to his demands, “I was perfectly indifferent to the numerical superiority of my opponents.”  Because, while numbers were on the opponents’ side — along with weapons, money, and the other accouterments of force — every spiritual law was against them; primarily the overriding law of unity to which all sages and most of modern science attest, which is the mother of all spiritual laws and which we can never break, though we stubbornly work at breaking ourselves against it.

This is why soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan are killing themselves in record numbers — or living lives of hell when they return.  And why a U.S. Marine who handed out food and blankets to tsunami victims in 2004 said, “I have been serving my country for 34 years and this is the first day I’ve gotten any fulfillment out of it.”  One simple way of describing a future we all want might be, a future where we can get 34 years of fulfillment from our work for maybe a day or two of waste!

Thanks to the universality of these laws any one of us can master the “science” of Satyagraha, as Gandhi did, and be able to redress the evils of our time without perpetuating them.  The science of Satyagraha is harder to master than math or physics, because the latter are objective — and because they are still, at present, so entrenched in our media, our education — our entire culture.  Even some scientists, who should know better, go on describing reality as the motion of material particles a hundred years after the very existence of separate, material particles fled like shadows in the glare of quantum theory.  Such is the power of an entrenched worldview.

But if we practice Satyagraha and explain to others that it is based on principles now supported both by the best of modern science and the enduring wisdom of humanity down the ages, we are bound, in the long run, to overcome the dismal, dehumanizing worldview that is causing vast suffering in the world.  We have somehow created a system that draws upon the lowest, most destructive drives of our evolutionary heritage; but we engaging the best of which we are capable.  We will be holding up a much higher image of human nature and the “compassionate design” of the universe that is not only what all of us deeply want but happens to be grounded in Truth.

We can get far in this work with only two founding principles, which we do not need to take on faith; we can hold them as hypotheses and test them out in our own experiences:  that there are spiritual laws in the universe, and they can be discovered, and used; and that despite all appearances — and here I will use the exact words of my meditation teacher, Eknath Easwaran — “love flows at bottom in the heart of every human being.”

It follows naturally from the first principle, the “compassionate design” of the universe, that “there is enough in the world for everyone’s need” — the cornerstone of Gandhi’s economics.  It follows from the second that there is no conflict that does not have a win-win solution if we can only discover it (which is usually a matter of knowing what our real needs and those of others are) — that there is no offender who cannot be redeemed, no opponent who cannot be won over.

That the universe has a meaning, that it is pervaded by spiritual forces that every one of us can use to fulfill that meaning is the Good News of the 21^st Century.  Nonviolence is as native to this world as violence is inevitable in the “classical” view, often called dogmatic materialism.  That view is clinging stubbornly to life, even though it made us feel “like gypsies in the universe,” as one scientist put it, where the most important things about us — our ability to feel, to love — were explained away rather than celebrated.  It is high time to lay it to rest and we have every resource now at our disposal to manifest the brighter alternative.

RETURN TO METTA’S HOMEPAGE

Starting a revolution is like lighting a match; it risks becoming extinguished as quickly as it was lit. Sustaining a revolution, however, is like starting a fire, and ensuring that it has the fuel to burn as long as necessary. As an agent of change, I need that fire for as long as it takes for results to emerge, otherwise, I risk burn-out. How can we tell if our flame will prevail? We can know by checking our hearts: either we are burning with hatred and blame or with compassion and love.

Those who profess a commitment to what is called strategic nonviolence know how to start a revolution, that is, in the same way that one would have to fight if one is the weaker party: you do what you your opponent is trying to prevent you from doing, you cast all or most of the blame on them, and you draw upon the sympathies of the masses—the “reference public”– to express your power. In this approach it’s acceptable to use threat, humiliation, and coercion to get what you want,  and you often accept short-term and short-lived “success” as your goal. Nonviolence in this approach is simply refraining from physical violence while one’s inner frustrations and pains continue to grow, or are left wholly unresolved. After lighting the match of revolution, a person using nonviolence by this definition can walk away from the responsibility to carrying it forward for the long run. So a people left their guns at home this round? Where will it get them when they decide to take them back out because a limited vision of nonviolence did not bring about the deep changes needed? Look at Egypt “post-revolution,” and Libya, for case by case examples.

If I truly cared about the people I want to serve, however, I take the whole human being, their entire humanity, into account. So, while certain individuals gained fame and recognition for their contributions to starting revolutions in 2011 for example, I wonder if that recognition was not premature, if not short-sighted: we should ask ourselves, is this kind of revolution going to last? Witnessing one too many “progressives” shouting their discontent at cheering, furious crowds, we need to step back: can hatred, blame and resentment continue to inspire a long-term struggle? I, for one, have never found this approach entirely inspiring, mature, or even entirely honest.

The revolution, as we often say at the Metta Center, is not about putting a different kind of person in power; it is about awakening a different kind of power in people. The kind of satisfaction that comes from hating another human being is nothing compared to the satisfaction that comes from transforming hatred into respect and consideration of the humanity of the other. The sense of security that comes from rejoicing in the death and misery of another human being is the absolute lowest form, and it is nothing compared to the joy of rejoicing in the happiness, and sharing in the sorrow, of other people. In South Africa during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, they called this ‘Ubuntu,’ the concept that I affirm my humanity by affirming the humanity of others, or it is through other people that one is a person. In other words, one of the first ways of sustaining ourselves for revolution is by an awareness that I cannot do harm to another without harming myself. Peace psychologist Rachael MacNair has coined this truth in social science as ‘perpetration induced traumatic stress,’ or PITS. Yet just as I cannot harm another without harming myself, fortunately, I cannot truly benefit another without deeply experiencing that benefit in my own life. This is the point: if we want to create a society that takes humanity into consideration, the revolution will sustain itself when we learn how to do it ourselves, within ourselves. In the words of the great Burmese leader Aung San Suu Kyi:

 ”The quintessential revolution is that of the spirit, born of an intellectual conviction of the need for change in those mental attitudes and values which shape the course of a nation’s development. A revolution which aims merely at changing official policies and institutions with a view to an improvement in material conditions has little chance of genuine success.”

Don’t get me wrong—I am not suggesting that there is not an outward struggle to wage; there is. I am suggesting that how we wage the struggle matters, and thus how we define our nonviolence also matters. If we limit our definition to simply “not using (physical) violence,” we should be suspicious that such a reduction can lead to more violence down the road because it denies our humanity. Further, we should not feel insulted if our opponents fail to see us for something more than threatening masses who endanger their personal i.e., physical, well-being, provoking further violence and repression from them.  But is this who we are? Are we out there to pick fights or to make lasting change?  If we widen our view to encompass a higher image of who we are,  nonviolence means channeling and transforming violent thoughts, refraining from violent insults and language, as well as not using the body as an instrument of harm but an instrument of peace. Not only do we have a strategy, but we have a higher vision of what is possible and who we are as people. That, to me, is revolutionary.

A way to begin affirming this deeper commitment is by turning our attention inward (e.g. by unplugging from the mass media, which are grabbing our attention outward).  Inner awareness is a tool to understanding our thoughts and emotions. We can look at it on the personal scale as well as the collective, but let’s start with individuals. When anger, frustration and resentment arise, don’t immediately blame others or take it out on the person next to you, even if they did provoke you. Neuroscience shows that human beings will respond negatively to threats, whether real or imagined Take a walk, get exercise and give yourself detachment from the visceral response (which studies show take about an hour to pass through before we can begin to calm down, but experience tells me that this can take days and weeks).  Upon achieving detachment from the situation, if you realize that the threat is real and not imagined, make a strategy for solving the problem nonviolently and constructively. You are not repressing anger, you are simply harnessing it for its full effectiveness. Unharnessed anger is an unlocked gateway to violent behavior which never is a one time occurrence, it will happen again; when it is harnessed, you can look squarely at the problem and direct that energy directly to it and solve it permanently. As we often quote Martin Luther King referring to anger in the Civil Rights movement, “We did not cause outbursts of anger. We harnessed anger under discipline for maximum effect.” Included in this effect is a rerouting of the violent energy so it does not recur as such.

This turning inward is a turning away from our conditioned responses that we have developed over time to maintain some kind of order in our minds. It is time we moved away from cruelty and alienation, and refused to give it a place in our toolkits of revolution. We can challenge ourselves all day long, as a personal nonviolence training; every small victory in becoming kinder is fuel for the fire for the long-term struggle for freedom. It is much harder than strategic nonviolence, and realizes the true meaning of “civil” in “civil resistance.”

Sufi poet Jalaluddin Rumi reminds us, “Love is that fire which when kindled burns everything else away.”

After that revolution, what remains? It’s time we found out.

RETURN TO METTA’S HOMEPAGE 

Turning Our Backs on Consumerism
By Eknath Easwaran

As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world—that is the myth of the “atomic age”—as in being able to remake ourselves.
—Mahatma Gandhi

In one of my favorite Sanskrit stories from ancient India, an ambitious rat goes to the Lord and asks to become a human being. The Lord grants his wish, and the rat is born into the world of people. He spends several lifetimes as a human being; finally, after quite a bit of experimentation and a great deal of grief, he goes back to the Lord and implores, “Please make me a rat again. Being a human is too hard—I’m just not cut out for it.”

I often think of this story when people tell me I am being idealistic about human nature. “It would be nice,” they say, “if we human beings could override impulses like fear, greed, and violence when we see that they threaten the welfare of the whole. But that’s just not realistic. Whenever there is a conflict between reason and biology, biology is bound to win.”

Arguing like this, some observers feel that we have passed the point of no return. Like lemmings, they seem to say, we must race to a destruction we ourselves shall have caused. I differ categorically—and for proof I have the living example of Mahatma Gandhi, who not only transformed fear, greed, and violence in himself but inspired hundreds of thousands of ordinary men, women, and even children in India to do the same.

When I was a student in my twenties India had been under British domination for two hundred years. It’s difficult to imagine what that means if you haven’t lived through it. It’s not just economic exploitation; generations grow up with a foreign culture superimposed on their own. When I went to college, I never questioned the axiom that everything worthwhile, everything that could fulfill my dreams, came from the West. The science, the wealth, the military power, all demonstrated unequivocally the superiority of Western civilization. It never occurred to most of us to look anywhere else for answers.

But then along came Gandhi, who was shaking India from the Himalayas in the north to Cape Kanniyakumari in the south. Everyone in the country was talking about Gandhi the statesman, Gandhi the politician, Gandhi the economist, Gandhi the educator. But I wanted to know about Gandhi the man. I wanted to know the secret of his power.

In his youth, I knew, Gandhi had been a timid, ineffectual lawyer whose only extraordinary characteristic was his big ears. By the time he came back to India from South Africa in 1915, he had transformed himself into such a mighty force for love and non-violence that he would become a lighthouse to the whole world. And I had just one driving question: What was the secret of his transformation?

My university was in Nagpur, a strategic location at the geographic center of India where all the major railways connecting north and south, east and west, came together like spokes in a wheel. Nearby lay the town of Wardha, a dot on the map thrown into international recognition as the last railway junction before Gandhi’s ashram. The rest of the way one had to travel on one’s own. I walked the few miles down the hot, dusty road to the little settlement that Gandhi called Sevagram, “the village of service.”

At Sevagram I found myself among young people from around the world—Americans, Japanese, Africans, Europeans, even Britons—who had come to see Gandhi and to help in his work. Whether a person’s skin was white, brown, or black, whether he or she supported or opposed him, seemed to make no difference to Gandhi: he related to all with ease and respect. Almost immediately, he made us feel we were part of his own family.

Indeed, I think that, in a private corner of our hearts, we all saw ourselves in him. I did. It was as if a precious element common to all of us had been extracted and purified to shine forth brightly as the Mahatma, the Great Soul. That very commonness was what moved us most—the feeling that in spite of all our fears and resentments and petty faults we too were made of such stuff. The Great Soul was our soul.

At that time, of course, there were many observers who said Gandhi was extraordinary, an exception to the limitations that hold back the rest of the human race. Others dismissed him—some with great respect, others with less—as just another great man who was leaving his mark on history. Yet, according to him, there was no one more ordinary. “I claim to be an average man of less than average ability,” he often repeated. “I have not the shadow of a doubt that any man or woman can achieve what I have, if he or she would make the same effort and cultivate the same hope and faith.”

The fact is, while most people think of ordinariness as a fault or limitation, Gandhi had discovered in it the very meaning of life—and of history. For him, it was not the famous or the rich or the powerful who would change the course of history. If the future is to differ from the past, he taught, if we are to leave a peaceful and healthy earth for our children, it will be the ordinary man and woman who do it: not by becoming extraordinary, but by discovering that our greatest strength lies not in how much we differ from each other but in how much—how very much—we are the same.

This faith in the power of the individual formed the foundation for Gandhi’s extremely compassionate view of the industrial era’s large-scale problems, as well as of the smaller but no less urgent troubles we found in our own lives. Our problems, he would say, are not inevitable; they are not, as some historians and biologists have suggested, a necessary side effect of civilization.

On the contrary, war, economic injustice, and pollution arise because we have not yet learned to make use of our most civilizing capacities: the creativity and wisdom we all have as our birthright. When even one person comes into full possession of these capacities, our problems are shown in their true light: they are simply the results of avoidable—though deadly—errors of judgment.

Gandhi formulated a series of diagnoses of the modern world’s seemingly perpetual state of crisis, which he called “the seven social sins.” I prefer to think of them as seven social ailments, since the problems they address are not crimes calling for punishment but crippling diseases that are punishment enough in themselves. The first—and the one we will focus on here—is knowledge without character. It traces all our difficulties to a simple lack of connection between what we know is good for us and our ability to act on that knowledge.

Knowledge Without Character

To me, the central paradox of our time is that despite our powerful intellectual skills and our ingenious engineering and medical achievements, we still lack the ability to live wisely. We send sophisticated satellites into space that beam us startling information about the destruction of the environment, yet we do little, if anything, to stop that destruction.

As Martin Luther King, Jr., put it, we live in a world of “guided missiles and misguided men,” where few technical problems are too complex to solve but we find it impossible to cope with the most basic of life’s challenges: how to live together in peace and health. In our lucid moments we see that we are doing great harm to ourselves and our planet, but somehow, for all our intellectual understanding, we cannot seem to change the way we think and live.

This is not to say we are bad people. The problem is simply that we have not yet completed our education. When Gandhi speaks of knowledge without character, he is not implying that we know too much for our own good. He is saying that because we do not understand what our real needs are, we are unable to use our tremendous technical expertise in a way that might make our lives more secure and fulfilling. Instead, we treat every problem as if it were a matter for technology, or chemistry, or economics, even when it has nothing to do with these things.

Every day, for example, dozens of new products appear, promising to satisfy our deepest desires. We are barraged with messages—subliminal and otherwise—on billboards and in magazines, on television and in the movies, telling us that everything we are looking for in life can be found in a car or a bowl of ice cream or a cigarette.

The hidden message is that what we own or eat or smoke has the power to endow us with self-respect. Actually, I would say it is the other way around. Your car may be useful and comfortable, it may have a wet bar and a cellular phone, but that is not why it is dignified. You, a human being, are the one who gives dignity to your car by driving it. If it were not for you, that car would be only a hunk of metal.

Over the past fifty years, the automobile, like so many of our appliances and machines, has sped down the now-familiar psychological highway from desirable luxury to basic necessity to tyrannical master. We no longer choose to drive a car—we have to: there are so many things to do, so little time to do them, and so far to travel in between. We rush about from place to place, caught in a perilous game of catch-up, and the price is high: nearly fifty thousand Americans lose their lives in traffic accidents every year. The irony is, we are often in such a hurry that we can’t get anywhere. I have read that commute time in Tokyo and London now is often less by bicycle than by car; and to judge by rush hour on our freeways, our situation is not much different.

Worse than the loss of time, of course, is the threat to our health. In each of those cars, according to recent research conducted in Los Angeles, commuters are exposed to two to four times the levels of cancer-causing toxic chemicals found outdoors. And as it idles there on the freeway, the average American car makes a significant contribution to the greenhouse effect, pumping its own weight in carbon into the atmosphere each year.

These things are not secrets. We have all heard them many times before, but we find it hard to do anything about them. Our cities and towns have grown in such a way that we feel helpless without a car. And as our cities expand ever farther into the surrounding countryside, the situation promises to get even worse.

The problem is that the roots of our dependence on the auto go deeper than the desire for a convenient mode of transportation. There is a much more powerful force at work here—a force that characterizes almost every activity in industrial society: profit. Under the relentless domination of the profit motive, we have remade our country in the image of the automobile. As the political historian Richard Barnet writes, describing America in the middle decades of this century,

Buying highways meant buying motels, quick food eateries,…and the culture of suburbia….The highway system was the nation’s only physical plan, and more than anything else it determined the appearance of cities and the stretches in between. In choosing the automobile as the engine of growth, the highway and automotive planners scrapped mass transit.

Oil shortages and higher gasoline prices have led us to regret turning a blind eye toward such practices, yet we go on driving more and more, drilling new oil wells, making and buying more and bigger cars. In just one hundred years, urged on by the profit motive and the media conditioning that driving is entertainment and our car is an extension of our personality, we have used up nearly half of the world’s known petroleum reserves, fouled our air, and put our oceans and beaches at continual risk from oil spills.

Now, I have nothing against automobiles. I have a car, and I appreciate its utility. All I would say is, it is important to remember who is serving whom. If we were the masters of our machines—and our lives—we would have good, well-made cars and good roads on which to drive, but wouldn’t we also use them sparingly, so our children and our children’s children would have enough oil left to heat their homes?

Nor am I suggesting that there is anything wrong in a businessperson making enough profit to support his or her family in comfort—everyone should have this opportunity. But we have exaggerated the importance of profit out of all proportion to its natural place in business. We have become addicted to it, and that is a very dangerous situation.

Most addictions begin innocently enough. “Just one more helping, one more bowl of ice cream, one more cigarette, one more drink for the road.” That is how it starts—just one more: “Let’s sell just one more new car, make one more dollar, pump one more gallon of gas.”

When we give in to that desire repeatedly, with a second helping, a second smoke, a second drink, or a second sniff, it becomes a habit—not just one more but one every day: “The stockholders want to see this quarter’s profits rising above last quarter’s. Get the general manager on the phone and tell him to increase production, bolster demand, and heat up consumption. And do it yesterday.”

With a habit we still have a choice whether to give in or not, but when a habit continues long enough, we lose our power to choose. Our feeling of security becomes so closely attached to the thing we crave that we must have it, whatever the cost. The habit has become a compulsion, and we have become its servant. We will do anything for a profit, even if it means sacrificing our children’s precious seas, air, and earth. This is what Gandhi means by knowledge without character—a lack of connection between what we know to be in everyone’s long-range best interest and our ability to act on that knowledge. It has become the cornerstone of much of our business and our lives.

Transforming Our Character

Anyone who has tried to overcome a powerful addiction like smoking or drinking or overeating knows there can be a broad, dangerous chasm between what we know is good for us and our ability to act on it. Once a habit has been conditioning the nervous system for many years, beating a path to the refrigerator or the cigarette machine or the lotto counter, it has also carved a track far below the conscious level of the mind, in the hidden world of the unconscious.

When an addiction has established itself like this in the unconscious, it can have a devastating effect on behavior. No matter how much we are told about the dangers, we often find ourselves falling helplessly back into old habits. Once, while waiting for a friend at the hospital, I saw a paralyzed man in a wheelchair struggle for some time with a package of cigarettes. Despite the fact that he could hardly move, a powerful compulsion was telling him to get out a cigarette, lift it to his lips, and light it. Laboriously and painfully, he complied. It took him nearly a quarter of an hour.

Now consider another patient—ourselves.

Few people realize that many of the food items now sold in a typical American supermarket—from potato chips to tomatoes to frozen pizzas—need an injection of petroleum at every step of their production and marketing. Herbicide, fertilizer, insecticide, tractor fuel, processing fuel, plastic packaging, transportation to the supermarket, refrigeration: all these require fossil fuels in some form—usually petroleum. Why use all this oil, when we have managed to do quite well for millennia with only sun, water, and soil? As I understand it, the answer begins with a seed: not just any seed, but a seed created after years of research and development.

Farmers and food processors have begun using seeds produced by sophisticated hybridization techniques and genetic engineering to grow fruit or vegetables to meet shipping and processing needs, like a potato that makes a perfect potato chip or french fry, or a tomato with the best shape, skin, and consistency for canning. The only financial drawback to such seeds is that they require a host of petroleum and chemical products to achieve the high yields they promise. Ingeniously, many firms have overcome that drawback by acquiring their own chemical, petroleum, and farm equipment companies. Some have gone so far as to acquire a genetic engineering firm that can design seeds to require just the products their companies manufacture. In this way, they can almost give away the seeds and still make a handsome profit.

From the consumer’s point of view, I am afraid there are other drawbacks. Most of the tomatoes grown today are bred for profit, not nutrition; these are not the juicy, delicious tomatoes, ripened on the vine, you might once have tasted in your mother’s kitchen garden. They are hard, almost square hybrids, ripened on a truck and often covered with dangerous chemical residues. They are genetically engineered for high yield, attractive color, disease resistance, and ease of canning or shipping. Only after these things has taste been considered, and nutrition hardly at all.

Then why do we buy them? Why not demand something better? I would suggest that the answer is to be found not in our economics but in our mental state. We have been conditioned to look to food for our inner fulfillment. Food can entertain us, we are told. It is exciting; it is romantic; it is adventurous; it is dignified. Vast sums of money are spent trying to get us to buy a certain brand of potato chip or to prefer one brand of frozen pizza over another. In the midst of this carnival atmosphere, it is easy to forget that the real purpose of food is to nourish our bodies.

Doctors remind us frequently of the consequences—junk food and heart disease, pesticides and cancer—but health is not just a matter between us and our physician. The health effects of industrial agriculture go far beyond what happens to us when we eat its products. They pose an even greater risk to the food supply our children will depend on in coming decades.

Consider the many different ways petrochemical products are used in producing a bag of agribusiness corn chips. First, because agribusiness farms are usually very large, a vast amount of petroleum is needed to run all the machines that plow and fertilize the field, that plant, spray, and harvest the corn, and then process, package, and ship it.

But that is only the machinery. Contemporary hybrid seeds are designed to produce greater yields than ordinary seeds, but they work best only when used with high-nutrient artificial fertilizers, manufactured in a chemical factory, using petroleum as an ingredient and as a processing fuel. Then, to control insects, large quantities of powerful insecticides are used—introducing hundreds of toxic chemicals never before found in nature.

Now, high-nutrient chemical fertilizers nourish not only the corn but all sorts of other plants and weeds that compete with it. At the same time, insecticides harm the birds and insects that feed on those weeds. The sensible response might be to use less chemical fertilizer and insecticide and to apply them only when needed, if at all. But this kind of care is impossible on a huge farm, where the chemicals are applied with large machinery or by airplane, hundreds of acres per day. The profit-oriented solution is to come up with yet another product that can be sold to every farmer who uses chemical fertilizers: herbicides. With tremendous ingenuity, agribusiness engineers have even begun to match specific herbicides to the crop’s genetic pattern so the herbicide will kill everything but the corn.

There is a hitch, though. In all this innovation, a great deal of attention is paid to the ratio of gross income to net profit, to the glamorous appearance of an ear of corn, or to the ease with which it can become a corn chip. Yet little thought is given to the topsoil, that fragile layer of minerals, organic matter, and insect life on which almost our entire food supply depends.

Although chemical fertilizers contain many of the nutrients a crop needs, they lack the humus and organic matter needed to nourish what is, after all, a living ecosystem. The topsoil’s earthworms and microorganisms depend on that organic matter. So does the topsoil’s capacity to hold water and prevent erosion. When chemical fertilizers are used continuously, the soil literally begins to starve. It loses its ability to retain water, and it needs ever-increasing amounts of irrigation. Then, as herbicides and insecticides are applied every season, year after year—eventually poisoning the microscopic life of the topsoil—the most important element in world agriculture is reduced to lifeless dust.

It does not make sense. Perhaps it might if the foods we ended up with were better—better tasting or better for our health—but they are not. It might make sense if all these chemicals and oil helped the individual farmer, or made the earth healthier, or saved precious resources. But they do not. Or it might make sense if they really did ensure the safety and abundance of our food supply. They do just the opposite.

Petroleum-dependent agriculture may begin with a seed and the desire for profit, but it ends with us, when we reach for an item on the supermarket shelf. Without our cooperation and support, none of this would take place. We have helped in every stage, almost unconsciously believing that our dignity, fulfillment, and happiness are to be found in food or possessions or profits. We have become servants to our own unintended greed, and it is not a benevolent master.

In Gandhi’s perspective, it is up to individuals like you and me to reverse this situation. Environmental abuse and exploitation are not “necessary evils”—no evil is necessary. In fact, Gandhi went so far as to say that evil in itself is not even real; it exists only as long as we support it. The moment we withdraw our support—the moment we make the connection between what we know and how we behave—it begins to collapse. As the eighteenth century British statesman Edmund Burke put it, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

Nevertheless, in our current situation, good men and women have little time to lose. At a breakneck pace, knowledge without character is making drastic changes in our atmosphere, our agricultural resources, our forests, and our seas. The cost in life is immeasurable.

The Power of Salt

On March 12, 1930, when the British still had a firm grip on India, Mahatma Gandhi and seventy-eight of his disciples strode out of Sabarmati ashram toward the sea. In the twenty-four days that followed, they walked two hundred miles, picking up more and more companions as village after village turned out to cheer the Mahatma and raise the new Indian flag. By the time they reached their destination, the seashore at Dandi, the group numbered several thousand.

Earlier in March, Gandhi had sent a letter to the British viceroy protesting the Salt Act, which forbade Indians to make their own salt and left them dependent on a British monopoly for what is, in a tropical country, a necessity of life. The viceroy did not reply. To Gandhi, this was the “opportunity of a lifetime.” On the morning of April 6, before a huge crowd including reporters from around the world, Gandhi walked to the edge of the sea, picked up a pinch of salt, and set India free.

It was Gandhi’s genius to recognize that although the British had the power to establish a monopoly on salt, they could maintain that monopoly only with the cooperation of the Indian people. With his inspiration and guidance, millions of ordinary individuals changed their lives in a small but powerful way: they stopped buying salt from the British and began making it themselves. Almost immediately, Indians along the coast and across the country were making, buying, and using homemade salt. A hundred thousand were jailed, and many more suffered great hardships, but throughout the campaign, millions of Indians refused steadfastly and without violence to depend on the British for salt. This brilliant campaign, which restored India’s confidence in herself, was the turning point in her long struggle for independence. Afterward India knew she was free, and nothing the British did could halt her march toward freedom.

Today, in a modern industrial society like the United States, our most pressing need is not for salt or clothing or shelter. For most of us, all our basic needs have been met. But there remains a hunger for something more. We want to be somebody. We want to feel secure. We want to love. Without any better way to satisfy these inner needs, we end up depending on possessions and profit—not just for our physical well-being but as a substitute for the dignity, fulfillment, and security we want so much. Because we still believe happiness lies in remaking the world around us, we look for inner fulfillment outside ourselves, and this makes us easy prey for manipulation.

How, then, shall we free ourselves?

Let’s start in little ways, by trying to make the connection between what we know to be healthy for our planet and what we do in our daily lives. As many environmentalists have suggested, we could walk instead of taking the car, or carpool or use mass transit instead of driving alone—that would be a small salt march in itself, with the added benefit that the commute would not be so lonely or expensive or long. We could start buying organic vegetables; if possible, we might even grow them in our own backyards, using no pesticides or other harmful chemicals. That would be the modern equivalent of making salt. We would be healthier, and so would the topsoil.

Yet, even small changes like these seem difficult. We all have so little time to spare; and we ask ourselves, what good would it do anyway? This is understandable. Without Gandhi’s example, I think few Indians could have been persuaded that the British would be ushered out of India peacefully and gently and that a new independent nation of India would be founded—all by the power of salt.

The tasks facing us today are enormous, but it is the glory of human nature that there will always be those rare individuals who say, “Let there be dangers, let there be difficulties, let there be the possibility of death itself—whatever it costs, I want to live in the full height of my being, with my feet still on the ground but my head crowned with stars.” According to Mahatma Gandhi, this can be done only by facing difficulties that appear almost impossible. If that is so, our times offer an unparalleled opportunity.

Our hope for the future lies with these rare evolutionaries who are not content to wait for others to change before they throw themselves into this unimaginably difficult task. “Strength of numbers is the delight of the timid,” said Gandhi. “The valiant in spirit glory in fighting alone.” What is the satisfaction in drifting along with the current? True satisfaction lies in swimming against the current of conditioned self-interest. It is dangerous, of course, but that is why it makes you glow with vitality. It is strenuous, but that is what makes your will and determination and dedication grow strong, your senses clear, your mind secure, and your heart overflowing with love and the desire to give and serve.

Gandhi is a supreme example. He wanted so deeply to help the world that he dedicated his life to siphoning every trace of self-interest out of his heart and mind, leaving them pure, radiantly healthy, and free to love. It took him nearly twenty years to gain such control of his thinking process, but with every day of demanding effort he discovered a little more of the deep resources that are within us all: unassuming leadership, eloquence, and an endless capacity for selfless service.

In me, in you—in every human being—burns a spark of pure compassion: not physical or even mental, but deeply spiritual. Our bodies may belong to the animal world, but we do not. The animal, to a great extent, lives subject to the force of conditioning, going after its own food and comfort. But we have the capacity to turn our back on profit or pleasure for the sake of others—to rebel deeply and broadly against our conditioning and build a new personality, a new world. It is our choice whether to exercise that capacity, but we do have the choice.

Spiritual teacher Eknath Easwaran founded the Blue Mountain Center of Meditation in 1961. His books includePassage Meditation and translations of the Classics of Indian Spirituality.

From The Compassionate Universe by Eknath Easwaran, founder of the Blue Mountain Center of Meditation, copyright 1993; reprinted by permission of Nilgiri Press, P. O. Box 256, Tomales, CA  94971.

The spinning wheel, and the spinning wheel alone, will solve the problem of the deepening poverty of India.    –Mahatma Gandhi

Corporate domination of the world, or “globalization from above,” has done two things for us.  It raised consciousness of world unity; inadvertently awakening “globalization from below,” and by progressively releasing all constraints on greed it finally squeezed the economic middle class, taking out from under them the false comfort of “a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage,” and thus reawakening, but in a new environment, the class struggles of the 1930s.  Given enough rope, the 1% have begun to expose the inherent contradiction of an economy based on wants (was it E.F. Schumacher who said, “anyone who thinks consumption can expand forever on a finite planet is either insane or an economist”?).

These are examples of what Walter Wink calls “gifts of the enemy.”  And the recent evictions from New York’s Zuccotti Park, LA, Washington D.C., and other sites apparent setbacks, can also be turned to advantage.  There is no question of stopping the movement at this, or possibly any point if it can move forward with the same energy but some greater sophistication.   A New York participant has issued a “call to reoccupy;” but I am among those who think the movement should move beyond occupation of public sites.  With the disaster of Tien An Minh Square still in my memory, I see the evictions as — in addition to a wake-up call on the militarization of America, for some of them have been rather brutal  — a call rather to regroup, reframe, rethink what this movement is really about. When occupiers approached Trinity Wall Street church in New York for permission to use a vacant lot recently, spokesperson Lloyd Kaplan had to deny the protestors demand but then added that he “supports the vigorous engagement of the issues” that concern them.  Occupying public spaces is not really our goal; and city police departments are not our opponents.

In characterizing 21^st Century civil society, often the first thing that comes to mind is its use of technology; but one of the most interesting innovations of the movement’s encampment culture has been its use of non-technology: the human microphone.  And one of the most dramatic cases of its use came after the movement spread to campuses.  At UC Davis, some time after the egregious pepper spray incident, a small number of police found themselves confronting a much larger crowd of students.  Men heavily armed and afraid are always an acute danger.  One of the students — “no designated leader” doesn’t always mean no leader will emerge — called out “mike check” and got the whole crowd telling the police in unison:

WE ARE GIVING YOU A MOMENT OF PEACE (we are giving you a moment of peace)…

TO WITHDRAW (to withdraw).

And after a tense moment, withdraw they did.

This episode illustrates not only that law enforcement is not the face of the enemy, necessarily; it also illustrates one of if not the most promising feature of the Occupy movement worldwide: its commitment to nonviolence.  Within that commitment — and here is where I think some sophistication could be immensely helpful — lies the germ of victory for this movement.

What would a thorough, mature, nonviolent movement look like?

For one thing, it would emphasize what Gandhi called “Constructive Programme,” which would allow us to build cohesion and strength for major resistance campaigns which are unavoidable but for which we are by no means ready, in my view.  It is good to have in mind how much weight Gandhi, with his astounding energy and creativity, put on constructive action.  A 1977 survey by the Gandhi Smarak Nidhi (Gandhi Memorial Fund) found 1,845 institutions in 22 states still functioning that were founded by Gandhi and his close associate, Vinoba Bhave.  It is not that we don’t have constructive projects underway: Yes! Magazine has been reporting on them for years.  But what we don’t have is a consciousness that these innumerable projects can be shaped into a coherent whole designed to create a world we want and put the most obnoxious features of the present one behind us.

In order to bring about this coherence, a model developed by Joanna Macy, which I will describe here in reverse order, is very useful.  Her last, and my first step is (3) change the culture, and do so both spiritually, i.e. by each of us getting some kind of spiritual practice if we do not already have one, and then cognitively, i.e. by sweeping the old culture out of our minds by not patronizing the commercial mass media. It’s not a coincidence that OWS was touched off by that quintessential counter-cultural organization AdBusters,  But when we do this we should bring into being a new culture by learning everything we can about nonviolence, a vastly richer field of study and practice than we’ve been lead to believe.  (Putting aside false modesty, I’d like to offer our website as a way into this fascinating culture).  Let us add something here that may seem like a luxury, an abstraction, but I believe is of paramount practical importance.  The dominant culture is based on an image of the human being.  We are separate bodies, gratified by consumption — that is the “subtext” of every commercial message and we are exposed to them several thousand times a day.  This image does great damage.  Metta, accordingly, has been promoting an alternative vision; if this, or something like it, were to be the underlying “story” we adopt, everything we promote would resonate with that new story and gain persuasive power:

• Life is sacred — all of it, even after you’re born!
• Life is an interconnected whole — including the nourishing planet
• We can never be satisfied by consumption, but by relationships
• We can never become secure by killing “enemies” or warehousing “criminals,” but by turning enemies into friends and restoring offenders to lives of dignity and meaning.

Next in Macy’s scheme is (2) creating new institutions. OWS was called into being to change economic institutions, so devastating to the inner and outer environment; but many of us realize that cannot be expected to last without also bringing in restorative justice to replace the cruel, broken system that’s disfiguring our society with its racial prejudice and sheer vindictiveness.  Similarly, the war system must be replaced by a range of alternatives stretching from world institutions like the International Criminal Court (ARE WE IN?) and the “Right to Protect” norm which opens the door for “outsiders” to intervene when a state fails to protect or even attacks its citizens to grass-roots organization like Peace Brigades International and Nonviolent Peaceforce that do that.  And finally,

(1) Stop the worst of the damage.  Without stifling the movement’s creativity, on the contrary as a way of enhancing it, the time has come to give it some strategic shape.  That shape would include — OK, not a list of demands, which presuppose that you’re dependent on your adversary — an inspiring picture of the world toward which we insist on moving and a set of steps by which we intend to get there.  At every step let us invite our adversaries, whoever they are, to join us; but let us put them on notice that we are prepared to launch telling civil disobedience if they try to obstruct (as of course some of them will) this precious progress.

In that strategic plan, à la Joanna Macy, let the most urgent things like global climate stress be listed first.  But you cannot build a movement, not to mention a world, on the contradictions of a wrong system.  That we must base on Truth, which seems to me to demand that we be constructive wherever possible and resistant when and where necessary.

We have knocked on the door of the financial citadel and have the ear of the public.  Let’s begin the conversation.

Return to Metta’s Home Page

How do we measure violence?

The question has come up because of recent studies by Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, featured on TED among other venues, which seem to show that, contrary to common opinion, violence has been steadily decreasing by a number of measures for several millennia.  Some of these measures are at first sight impressive, like the decrease in genocides and combat deaths, and of course, this is something we would very much like to believe. The reality, however, is more complicated.

So to our question: how do we measure violence?  Prof. Pinker cites the fact that combat deaths are decreasing over a relatively recent time period.  There are several reasons not to take this statistic at face value.  First, as others have pointed out, it ignores the phenomenon of structural violence: inequalities built in to the social system that cause death as surely as bullets.  Gandhi once said, “it little matters to me whether you shoot a man or starve him to death by inches.”  And as Johan Galtung, to whom we owe the term structural violence, has shown, this kind of violence is increasing severely (hence the rise of the 99%!).

But let’s go further.  In the American Civil War eight out of ten wounded soldiers died of their wounds (and they were primarily soldiers; now the main victims in war are increasingly civilians).  Today, with far more sophisticated medical technologies, that figure is probably more like one or two out of ten.  In other words, a decrease in combat deaths is not a decrease in violence, which has its primary dimension in the human heart.  If I shoot a man with the intention to kill him, I do not suffer less violence in my heart when he happens not to die of his wounds.  Indeed, this sanitization of violence has arguably enabled, rather than reduced violence.  And of that sanitization there are now horrible examples in drone warfare and other technologies of remote killing that separate, or seem to separate, men and women from the effects and the meaning of their actions.

With regrets, we have to go further still.  Look, for example, at a study done in the UK to sort out the effects of violent television that looked not at the number but the kind of violent incidents depicted.  The researchers found that violence between persons who were closely related (and all domestic violence falls in this category) was more devastating to watch than violence among strangers.  In other words, it is the depth of the human bond that’s being rent asunder, not so much the frequency of the act, that scars.  And it would be hard to deny that the kinds of violence people are doing to one another today were unthinkable early on in my own lifetime (i.e. during and after WWII).  Not that horrors never occurred in the past, but they were virtually never made entertainment-stuff by the mass media, whether disguised as ‘news’ or in overt fiction, and therefore they were both less acceptable and less frequent.  It pains me to mention in this category — but to understand what’s really going on we must — that torture was made acceptable to the American public right after 9/11, thus putting us squarely back in the camp of the Nazis whom people of my generation were taught to abhor.  In a word, the true measure of violence is not deaths or anything we can easily measure: it is dehumanization.

Fortunately, human consciousness  is not static.  There are patterns of growing sensitivity  clearly discernible in all human communities over the long span of time — growth in what we might call moral awareness, or the awareness of connectedness among fellow beings (and, ultimately, the planet that nurtures us).  Slavery was accepted from the time of the ancient Greeks, at least; then a group of Quakers stood up to it in England and it suddenly was not.  Its wrongness was exposed.  Tragically, as Melissa Anderson-Hinn points out, today there are “approximately  27 million slaves , more than twice the number involved in the entire 350-year history of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.”   As a practice, slavery has come back — a strong argument against Prof. Pinker’s general conclusion.  But its public legitimacy has not come back: the recidivism is a local downturn going against the trend of evolution, an artifact caused by the degradation of the human image in our bizarre industrial culture.

Because of this trend toward greater awareness, an act of violence can actually be more violent than it was a hundred years ago: its wrongness has become more evident — as St. Paul says, once the law has been announced violations of it are more damaging.  What else can account for the enormous rise of suicides among combat troops and veterans?  Did not Richard Barnett say two decades ago that America “perfected the art of war just when it was going out of style”?  By ‘out of style’ he did not mean that it was less frequently practiced, but that the practice of it was more spiritually, socially, and physically damaging; that, as suggested above, it was more obviously contrary to the drive of human evolution.

But now let’s turn the coin over.  While violence has been increasing, by what I consider the more meaningful measures listed above, so has its opposite.  Nonviolence has been increasing dramatically in the years since Gandhi and King, as anyone passing through Zuccotti Park can testify.  How do we measure nonviolence?  Again, as Gandhi incessantly pointed out, very much by the methods of science — provided we stop confining ‘science,’ as we have done for a long time now, to the study of the outside world, to what can be objectively measured.

The world is not a safer place in the sense that Prof. Pinker has been taken to mean, but it will be a safer place if we build on that alternative.

The other day I was chatting with a friendly checkout clerk at an upscale supermarket in Petaluma, CA.  The young woman behind me, far from getting impatient, cheerfully joined in.  This is California.  As the conversation was about little-known facts I took a chance and mentioned a little-known fact that has been much on my mind of late, the fact (yes, it is one) that on 9/11 three WTC towers were brought down by ‘controlled demolition.’ The clerk, a tall African fellow shook his head, “We don’t want to go there, when it comes to that one,” and the young woman’s good cheer froze. “I didn’t know that,” she stammered.

The facts made public by 1500 architects and engineers are no longer in doubt: that traces of nanothermite, the high-energy explosive used for such purposes, are evident in the dust of the site (even after much of the wreckage was hastily whisked away); the buildings fell into their own footprint in a way that would defy the laws of physics if they had fallen the way the official story has it; terrific explosions were heard and felt coming from beneath the buildings by numerous eye-witnesses (at least one of whom appears to have been murdered).  In short, the official story, that the buildings ‘pancaked’ to earth because key steel columns were softened by fire, is a lie.

“… by far the most usual way of handling phenomena so novel that they would make for a serious rearrangement of our preconception is to ignore them altogether, or to abuse those who bear witness to them” (William James) — i.e. by calling them “conspiracy theorists.”

Behavioral scientists, among them Lance deHaven-Smith from Florida State University, have given the rather bland name of SCADs, or State Crimes Against Democracy (most of these are cries against humanity) to acts that involve high-level government officials, often in combination with private interests, who engage in covert activities for political advantages and power. Proven SCADs since World War II include McCarthyism (fabrication of evidence of a communist infiltration), the infamous Gulf of Tonkin Resolution (President Johnson and Robert McNamara falsely claimed North Vietnam attacked a US ship), burglary of the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in effort to discredit Ellsberg, Iran-Contra, Florida’s 2000 Election and “fixed” intelligence on non-existent WMDs to justify the Iraq War.  What do many of these have in common with the battleship Maine, the Lusitania, Hitler’s staged Gleiwitz incident of August, 1939 and for that matter FDR’s pretending not to know the Japanese were about to attack Pearl Harbor two years later — and, as is now clear, the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, which exhaustive studies by James Douglass show to have been orchestrated by elements in high circles of our government?  Like 9/11 itself, sometimes referred to as “the new Pearl Harbor,” they were cooked up to thwart peace initiatives or to plunge a country, notably our own, into war.

They have been much on my mind because of the alleged plot by “highest officials” in the Iranian government to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in New York City.  While it is remotely possible that what we are being told is true, this story is so unbelievable that doubts have been raised even in the mainstream media, where such doubts are usually rigorously smothered.  And this moves the issue into far more serious territory than that of academic acronyms (like SCADS) or a curious form of ‘emperor’s new clothes.’  For let’s face it: the people who assassinated President Kennedy – and his brother, and Martin Luther King, whoever they are, certainly have the power and the madness to drag us into a third, and far more devastating Middle Eastern war.

This makes it extremely urgent that we break through the psychological numbness that makes it possible for horrendous crimes to be “hidden in broad daylight” with nary a whistle of alarm.  The syndrome has to be stopped, and if those conspirators have their eyes on Iran it has to be stopped before they go any further.

One is tempted to cry out, Dan Ellsberg or Julian Assange, step forward and snatch the cover off these people!  But whoever they are they moved swiftly after Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers to close the gap that got the camel’s nose under the tent of secrecy, to neutralize, as far as one can tell (e.g. from the electoral frauds of the 1990s) the one institution that protected us from this kind of plot, namely the courts.

The denial factor when it comes to monstrous crimes is very powerful, and the elements within and around our government who commit them have learned to count on it very successfully.  But as the old poem has it, “Truth crushed to earth will rise again;”  there is a resiliency in the human spirit that can surely be awakened so that a public now reeling from two disastrous military adventures that have brought us to the brink of financial and moral ruin already may show the plotters they have gone too far.  There is just a chance that we can use the latest ruse (as it appears to be) to not only stop the drive to wage war on Iran but break up the regime of lies and denial that is rendering our democracy powerless.  We will have to do two things:

•  Mount a “pledge of resistance” to offer serious civil disobedience in the event of any attempt to attack Iran militarily or provoke them into reckless action.  And more broadly,
• Bring about a regime of truth to replace the myth-driven fantasies that marked the country’s reaction to 9/11 (and concealed its origin).  This change has to reach deeper than the political: it has to include the existential lies of advertising — not just the lies about individual products (“scientific tests prove…”) but the implied lie that we need these products to be fulfilled — or need them at all, in most cases.  This is a kind of psychic background that renders us vulnerable to all manner of falsehood, including the “Star Wars” interpretation of terrorist attacks, and the belief that the only way to deal with them is war.

As Gandhi said, and demonstrated with his life, truth and nonviolence are opposite sides of the same coin.  Just as the practices of violence have lead us deeper and deeper into the regime of untruth, the practices of nonviolence can steadily liberate us from that deadly grip.

By Michael Nagler

Originally published on Waging Nonviolence, October 18, 2011

Remembering the agonies I went through when the tanks moved in on Tiananmen Square in June, 1989, I was relieved that most (I wish it were all) of the protestors who make up today’s amazing Occupy movement do not intend to occupy the symbolic spaces they are in indefinitely. This struggle is not about particular pieces of real estate but the institutions that may be associated with them—iconically, of course, Wall Street. And it would be a bad strategy—it’s always bad strategy—to hold on to symbols, especially when they make you an easy, concentrated target.

The movement has empowered youth (and others) in their hundreds of thousands to demonstrate in some 1,500 locations in 82 countries, creating in the process a beautiful culture of consensus decision making. But that was the easy part.

Now it is time to go from a “happening” to a movement, to not only protest against, but overturn and replace the obnoxious institutions and behaviors that have (at last) brought us together. For this, I think, three things will have to happen.
1) This has been largely a nonviolent movement; but we must realize that there’s nonviolence and nonviolence—or more conveniently put, nonviolence and non-violence, i.e. the mere absence of physical harm. The latter was well expressed by the words of a Yemeni protestor: “They cannot defeat us, because we left our guns at home.” In other words, not to irritate your oppressor is smart strategy. But the other degree of nonviolence, non-hyphenated if you will, can be heard in a ringing challenge of Gandhi’s: “It’s not nonviolence until you love your enemy.” He also characterized what he called “perfect ahimsa” (in today’s lingo, principled nonviolence) as “freedom from ill-will,” not just from weapons. In this degree of nonviolence, not to irritate your oppressor is not just strategic—useful as that may be—but a deep principle.

We need to awaken this principle if we want telling, long-lasting and deep change; and to do that the protestors will have to seperate the people from the behaviors they will no longer tolerate. Cursing “cops” as was done in Oakland  last week weakens us. Gratifying as they fall on our ears, labels like ‘bankster’ will have to come off, revealing people like us who got themselves into a fix because of the climate of alienation and greed in which we live.

As we’ve been urging at the Metta Center for some time, every individual who wants to make her or his maximum contribution to the great change we all need should stop patronizing the mass media that got us into this mindset of alienation and greed in the first place. She or he should replace that culture, with its desperately low image of the human being, with the culture—for it is one—of nonviolence. Read all the Gandhi you can get your hands on. We have “moved our money.” Beautiful. But we’ll be amazed what happens when we move something much more powerful than money: when we move our minds.

Happily, judging from the idealistic young faces I’ve seen first-hand and in YouTube videos, I don’t think this is at all impossible. I actually think it’s the challenge we’ve all been waiting for.

2) It is clear that the time is now to step back and come up with a long-term strategy. We should be no more stuck on one tactic or mode—protest—than we should be on one piece of real estate. Furthermore that strategy, as Rabbi Michael Lerner has pointed out, will have to grow past protest to include serious nonviolent resistance, e.g. civil disobedience. We are up against very serious entrenched interests backed by virtually limitless money and physical force. It can be overcome, because evil is always vulnerable, because money and force are limited instruments; but we must be prepared to meet it with an equivalent force of commitment and sacrifice.

The protestors, as the media point out, have a bewildering array of issues. Well, just about all of them are valid, because the malevolent energy of the system by now reaches almost everywhere. But we will have to understand the core of that malevolence and figure out how to confront and purify it. We will have to decide on what I call a keystone issue—something that’s winnable and well-aimed enough that succeeding at it will weaken the entire system.

Driving this strategy must be an overview that pulls together the innumerable economic and other alternatives that are already happening into a coherent picture. This is, if anything, more important than the protest piece. Nonviolence, as King said, is not just non-cooperating with evil but cooperating with good—Gandhi’s “constructive programme.” And finally,

3) Let’s remember what we’re really fighting for. When we call for the dignity of every person, does that not imply, as I suggested above, that we need to vastly improve our image of the human being per se? We should all be conversant with the way both modern science and the world’s spiritual traditions agree that we are not separate, material creatures doomed to compete for scarce resources; we are deeply interconnected, with one another, all life, the planet that nourishes and houses us. Our fulfillment comes from relationships, not consumption; our security comes from turning enemies into friends, not from eliminating them.

Six years ago I stood with a large group of young people on the roof of the student union building on the Berkeley campus, ticking off the ways they were better off in their understanding than we had been in the heady, but not very sophisticated days of the Free Speech Movement. It was exhilarating to see that improvement. It’s even more exhilarating to see it on the move.