Learning to See Each Other: Reflections on Humanity, Nonviolence, and Immigration
By Michael Nagler
TOWARD THE BEGINNING of St. Augustine’s Confessions, where he is pointing out how elements of his education that were considered normal were in fact immoral and scientifically wrong, he gives the harsh example of being taught to pay careful attention not to mispronounce the word ‘human’ when he was arguing in court for the death penalty—in effect, for driving someone from the human community.
In fact, all violence against our fellow human beings requires the psychological misrepresentation to oneself of denying they are, like ourselves, fully human. This is one reason that Gandhi practically equated nonviolence with Truth; and why violence is gaining on us in this age of untruth. All violence by its very nature denies the fundamental reality of our unity. That’s why it’s always counterproductive in the long run; as Gandhi pointed out, unarguably, what is unreal cannot endure, while what is real cannot be overcome. Except apparently, and harmfully.
Science has come up with a name for the inevitable harm one does to oneself by harming others: moral injury. Neuroscience has discovered where this happens in the brain: our mirror neurons. But ‘othering’ is far too deeply embedded in our evolutionary heritage to be overcome by these discoveries, which are only facts. This is where nonviolence comes in, for to quote Gandhi again, by taking on self-suffering you do more than move the head of another person, you “move the heart also.”
We often think at Metta, if only our fellow human beings could wrap their minds and hearts around the underlying signature of life: unity-in-diversity.
One evening I was in a train with a friend leaving London for her place in the south. Another lady we didn’t know was with us in the compartment. I was trying to meditate (what else is new) when an announcement came over the speakers about the next stop. The voice happened to be that of a young woman, her tone and cadence somehow familiar and comforting to me. That small sense of ease was abruptly broken when the lady riding with us said loudly to my friend, ‘Humph; sometimes you don’t feel at home in your own country.’ Multiply that fleeting moment of discomfort by millions, and you can begin to imagine the scale of hostility—wars, deportations, or everyday cruelty toward immigrants, even those legally present and contributing richly to their communities. The cruelty of this untruth can go so far that today in South Africa, as we recently learned from our friend Ela Gandhi, youths are blocking non-documented ‘aliens’ from getting into hospitals for needed care—not to mention what Israel is doing in Gaza.
There is a kind of deep education that could get us out of this. Structurally it would be based on that model of unity-in-diversity: once that is ingrained, differences are not a threat but a signature of life. It would also be based on the undeniable fact that in every one of us the same consciousness exists; hence the same basic capacities and the same needs—for consciousness 𑁋 and it would be a great step forward for education to deliver this 𑁋 is who we are, much more intimately than our physical manifestations, which are our individualities. God bless both; but God make us aware of the former, that we at last live in a world of living harmony.
