Two Students and an Experiment in Peace: The Svet Peace Project
Two students, Amir Bergen and Kanstantsin Tsiarokhin, met at St. John’s College and began asking what the kind of dialogue they practiced there might offer a world divided by war. The result was the Svet Peace Project, which brings young people from Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus together through literature, conversation, and shared inquiry. On this episode of Nonviolence Radio, we hear the story of Svet and explore how education itself can become a practice of peacebuilding.
Transcript, with gratitude to Elizabeth High
Stephanie Van Hook: You are here at another episode of Nonviolence Radio. I'm your host, Stephanie Van Hook, and I'm here in the studio with my news anchor of the Nonviolence Report and co-host of the show, Michael Nagler, and we're from the Metta Center for Nonviolence in Petaluma, California. And on the show, we explore nonviolence in all of its forms, from science, theory, history, practice, contemporary problems, all of it.
And this is a chance for people to think critically about nonviolence as a true solution that can help us in all ways possible. And, we're really excited about today's topic because it's one near and dear to our hearts at Metta as we're primarily an educational institution. And Michael, you have been an educator for your entire life. And the question that we're going to be looking at today is really the purpose of education and its connection to peace building. So just get us started a little bit, Michael, about how this question lands with you, when you were teaching at the University of California Berkeley, what is the purpose of education for you?
Michael Nagler: The purpose of education is for each person to develop his or her best capacities in connection with the whole, because it will become obvious if you really get to know who you are, that your meaning and purpose in life comes from service of others. In fact, I taught a course on that, meaning and purpose of life, and we ran across a quote from somebody who said, "The purpose of life is to serve others. That much is certain. What others are here for, I haven't the faintest idea." It was a little better. "We are here to serve others, this much is true. What others are here for, I haven't a clue."
Stephanie: Yeah, it rhymes. A, B, A, B.
Michael: Imagine, I was a comparative literature professor, and I missed the rhyme.
Stephanie: Okay. So, what do you see as the connection between education and peace?
Michael: Well, I believe, and I guess I belong to a community of people who believe, with St. Augustine, for example, that the purpose of life by our very nature, this is almost a direct quote. "By our very nature, we are forced to find community with others as broadly as possible." In other words, to extend the sense of oneness, of care, of mutual support, of love beyond the the circle in which we may find ourselves, just coming up by nature. I mean, in an extreme case, it could be a person who cares only about himself and he gets to be the president of the United States. Never mind. That you tend to care about your own community, and what we need to do, what education should help us to do, is to broaden and broaden that circle until, as Einstein said, it encompasses the whole world and all of nature in its beauty.
Now, in order for this to happen, we have to know who we are. We have to know that we have an element of infinity in us, so to speak. What the Quakers used to call that of God. And so we are not limited to this spatiotemporal envelope, which of course is our particular responsibility in this lifetime. And what I saw happening at institutions of learning at any level, including the very highest, was a reduction, a shrinkage of sense of purpose to that of making money. And, you know, I'm not against making money. I never have done it, but it's a legitimate purpose, but it is a travesty of who we are as human beings and what we need. And so I discovered that the word, the buzzword that would focus the real purpose of education, who we are, was nonviolence. That's why I started the program, Peace and Conflict Studies, and taught nonviolence. I'm happy to say that program is still going on.
Stephanie: All right. Well, there are other schools and colleges in the US, St. John's in particular, they have a great books program, and instead of having lecturers, they have tutors and guides who sit at the table in a circle with the students as they explore through Socratic process and dialogue, the meaning and the questions that arise for them in reading these.
Michael: Sounds like heaven.
Stephanie: Yeah, it does sound like it. And two graduates of St. John's, Amir Bergen and Kanstantsin Tsiarokhin, they founded a peace organization called the Svet Peace Project. And Svet is a Slavic term for light. And so when they first met as students at St. John's College, they decided that they wanted to get engaged in an unusual peace building project because there's a war in Russia and Ukraine. And so they thought about bringing together young people from Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, even as the countries are divided by war, to read and to talk with one another. And then through literature and dialogue, they wanted to create spaces where young people can question assumptions, think about really big topics like life and death, and listen across differences, which helps them to encounter one another as human beings. So it is that kind of self-development and self-seeing that you're talking about, Michael.
And so on today's show, we're going to hear from them and how Svet began, what they've learned from bringing young people together, and what education itself might have to teach us about building peace. So let's turn now to the Svet Peace Project.
Amir Bergen: My name is Amir. I'm born and raised in Russia, but then quite soon went all over the world. First to study in international boarding school in Armenia, in the city called Dilijan. They call it Armenian Switzerland. And then I came home, built one of the biggest [sic] stores in post-Soviet Union space. Then went to United States again and enrolled in St. John's College in Santa Fe to study philosophy and classical literature, and there I met the start of Russian-Ukrainian War, and then met Kanstantsin, and then our project was born, that maybe Kanstantsin will talk more about.
Kanstantsin Tsiarokhin: My name is Kanstantsin , and I grew up in Belarus, which is squeezed in between Russia and Ukraine, west of Russia, and mostly there I spent my kind of formative years. I then moved to Ukraine for a little bit prior to the war, where some of my extended family lives. And I was there for a year before the start of the war, '21-'22. And when the war began, I was in the capital. I lived there at the time, and it's quite intense of an experience just seeing that unfold in front of you and on the streets that you walk and love.
So I had to leave Ukraine after that, and I enrolled at St. John's as well in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where we studied classics and philosophy. And it was a big change to see war take place back home and then fly out to Santa Fe, New Mexico, this kind of most peaceful place on earth, and study classics for four years. It was a very strange, very strange experience. But nonetheless, I was a year above Amir at St. John's when we met, and both of us were some of the few students who spoke Russian on campus. There's not a lot of international students there. We bonded over our ethnic similarity at first, and then both of us were living through our experience of war that's quite different, but nonetheless experience of the same war.
And we started thinking quite seriously about how to do something about it. There's very little you can do. The situation is so chaotic and so tough that especially being so far away, there is very little you can do. So we were thinking for a while, maybe start some kind of charity, maybe collect money for this or that, and those are all good thoughts. But at some point we thought maybe we can do something more specific to our lives since we are such strange people who study classics in this very bizarre place in New Mexico. Maybe we can at least try to apply ourselves in that way. And St. John's is unique in so far as there's a great books curriculum that's unified, so everyone studies it who is at college for four years, and all the classes are seminar-run. So it's not student-run per se, but it's very much a conversation that every class is with the presence of a professor or two professors usually who take a role, something in between the lecturer and the student. And that's a very unique way of learning. It's very challenging but also very edifying in our experience.
And so we decided to do something like that but in Russian with people back home. And so we got a small grant from Middlebury Institute and we had a summer program sponsored by them, and basically we hired a couple of teachers from Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus, which are the three countries that are now at war, as I understand it. And then we invited students from the three countries as well, and we wanted basically to have space where all of the students from around those three countries who actually are in those countries have conversations about kind of classical literature of our region. And it was quite a success, not without difficulties, but it was overall a successful program and a very pleasing experience, especially for both of us because of how much we struggled with feeling helpful personally.
Michael: Kanstantsin, by the way, I taught classics at Berkeley for many years, so hopefully at some point there will be peace in the world and we can talk about Homer and other things. But I would really like to learn from both of you at this point, what do you study with what materials, and what kind of educational goal do you have that you hope will lead to a more peaceful environment?
Amir: And now we have courses that involve not only teenagers from the region that we already mentioned, but pretty much spreads all over the world. And not only literature we also use. Today, we also watch movies. Sometimes we use other forms of art, such as classical paintings or music pieces. It all depends on the kind of group that we work with, and usually we try to find the medium that is most accessible, yet deep enough for a productive conversation, for a productive Socratic discussion that you can have.
And for example, in the course that Kanstantsin was teaching just before our interview, we're really focusing on short stories from all around the world, and the course is literally titled "Many Ways To Be Human." And there we just pick up classical and just Nobel Prize-winning short stories from all around the world, starting from Canada and going all the way to Japan, India, Colombia, and many other countries that I probably don't remember.
So we try to follow a classical canon, but a classical canon is what you make it often, too, so it is quite wide.
Kanstantsin: What I recently like teaching, and it's been a work in progress very much encountering different students and seeing what works and what doesn't and experimenting with it; I watch lots of Hitchcock films with my students, which I think just give me so much opportunities to speak about really deep subjects, especially death and marriage, I think are, like, big obsessions of Hitchcock, in my experience, and both extremely valuable themes to speak upon with young students, we're mostly working with high schoolers. And in terms of short stories, I was just teaching a seminar on a Chekhov short story. And before that, I taught a Flannery O'Connor short story. These kind of authors that I guess I personally grew to like at St. John's. We read some of them at St. John's. And that they're recent enough that they're more accessible.
I guess reading Homer, with all of my love for Homer, would be a bit more strenuous for many students, although I'm not excluding that possibility. When I taught in Harlem for a year in New York City, I was working with middle schoolers, and many of them couldn't read very well. And I was a bit puzzled by what to do, because most of my work orients around reading in one way or another. So we started looking at classical paintings and Rembrandt and Boccaccio, and it was really wonderful the kind of discussions we could have. So yeah, I think Amir is very right that we try to adapt to individual students when we do that kind of work.
Amir: And I think, Michael, there was also a part of your question where you were wondering why we do it, right? Or what are we trying to achieve with that? Is that right?
Michael: That's right, Amir, yeah.
Amir: Okay. We believe that by learning in such dialogue-based format through various powerful mediums, teenagers essentially learn to think, listen, and speak in ways, it's part of our mission actually, to speak in ways that create connection. That essentially makes a person more empathic, and then resulting in a more, not maybe peaceful, that wouldn't be the right word, but yeah, more empathic person. And there is scientific evidence to it, and our own post and pre-course surveys proved that teenagers are more empathic towards each other, and we can talk much more about this, but that's the mission. That's where the peace in the name of our project comes, not from, but for what. That is what it is for.
Micheal: The Dalai Lama has said that compassion is the religion of this age, that empathy and compassion are the absolutely most important skills to develop. And I agree with you guys that to some extent that can be done by reading novels and poetry from other countries, other people, other eras. I think Stephanie would agree with that too.
Stephanie: Let's dig into that a little bit more. From your own experience as students at St. John's, spending four years diving into these conversations around classical literature, and what changed in yourself? What did you discover about who you are?
Amir: I'm thinking about a story with my father that I keep telling to people, and to me it is at least most vivid example of what changed in me, and I'll try to...Yeah, I think I can tell it briefly. So my father and I weren't always agreeing on things. So unusual, right? Yeah, wow. And shortly before I went to United States, we weren't particularly agreeing with each other, let's say. And then when I came back from my freshman year to see him, I didn't notice any change in me or whatsoever. And it is hard, right? When you live with yourself day to day, it's hard to see any change, even visual, right? We barely notice how we, I don't know, lose or gain weight and things like this. But I remember how I was just sitting in my room, and he entered my room with no question, like fathers do, and by that point, I think we probably spent a week or two with each other. And so he just walks into my room and he tells me, "Amir, I don't know what happened, but I suddenly feel like you understand me better," and he left, and didn't close the door, of course, like fathers do. But he said this and left. And only, I think, in maybe not several years, but only later, once we, me and Kanstantsin, started formulating what we do in our project and why and started thinking about it more deeply, I remembered this and to me, personally, it was perhaps one of the greatest testaments that at least it worked on me, and Kanstantsin probably could also run you a few examples.
But I think just insofar as your thought, to try as hard as you can four times a day for one and a half hours, sometimes two hours, to understand what other people are saying, it's very hard to leave that in a classroom and not take it with you in your life. It's not something that you just only use in a class, and especially because you are talking essentially. It's a sustained and a concentrated discussion, of course, but it's hard to just leave that and forget or leave in a classroom. So it's just you can't really do anything, and it just becomes the way you approach other people. Instead of being, maybe not even aggressive, but assertive when you're talking to someone, especially to someone who you tend to disagree more often than agree. Instead of being assertive, you suddenly find yourself trying to clarify what the person is trying to say, or ask a leading question or be softer with what you're saying. And these people who you talk to on a regular basis notice this. And I have similar stories with my brother and sister who also tell me, "It used to be next to impossible talking to you, but now it's so easy and non-judgmental." And of course, I don't want to speak too good of myself in this regard, but this is the change. I'm talking about the change. Of course, there is much to improve, and I'm trying to do it. But the switch from me before St. John's and me after St. John's freshman year was very vivid. And I think, and maybe Kanstantsin can speak about it more, we notice it to a degree in students, and we see from our surveys again that at least they see it in themselves, in their daily lives, the change before and after.
Kanstantsin: Yeah, if I can add just a couple of things. For me, the experience at St. John's was striking insofar as it really showed me that for some mysterious reason, just doing this thing which is very hard, very demanding, reading and long extended discussions about it with a variety of people really makes for some great friendships with people you don't even expect to be friends with. With the strangest people really I'm just friends. Like I can't believe with what kind of people I'm friends with right now. It's just amazing to me, to be honest. Like people who are just so different from me, but for whom I developed such great affection. It's maybe like I've never been in army, but maybe what going through like an army training or just some kind of intense communal experience is like.
That was very revealing to me and my relationship with Amir, whom I befriended very early, and other people with whom I maintain a very close relationship to this day. And I think there's something powerful about specifically the fact that we're all united when we're in a classroom, when we're running our discussions. We're all united by something that's deeper than any one of us. Like when we're reading a short story by a genius, there is something all of us have to learn and all of us are falling short of, if that makes sense. And I think that experience is very humbling and also makes you realize that you really need others in some essential way to figure it out. It's really hard to do it on your own, and it's really hard to do it together, but slightly easier and slightly more enjoyable.
So that was a big revelation, and I think in our seminars now, we've expanded beyond the scope of Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine for reasons that are rather complicated. Basically it's just a bit dangerous as we perceive to work with students from there right now. It's dangerous for them in the first place. But we have students in the same classroom from Pakistan and India, for example, or Iraq and Israel. Or America and Mexico. I'm not saying that there is some kind of specific animosity between America and Mexico, but I'm just saying that I guess neighboring countries tend to be rather tense in terms of the relationships more generally.
And we have those discussions where all of those people come together and in English, okay, imperfect but palatable English, discuss these really hard things and form, I think, deep relationships. And at least they have the experience that's with them for the rest of their lives of having this interesting, unique discussion for two hours with these people who maybe they would otherwise deem enemies or something worse than that. So to me, that's a powerful thing about our project.
Michael: It was very powerful for me, Kanstantsin, when I was teaching at Berkeley, because Berkeley is a big international place, and what I first noticed it was with students between Israelis and Palestinians. They'd be sitting in the same classroom, and suddenly the big polarization would melt away because they had a third thing. And I began to feel that there was a great potential there that we were not using to create peace between peoples who were in very tense relationships with one another. I still feel that way. I still feel there's a lot to be done there that could make things better, and I'm thinking you guys are trying to do exactly that. But it does show again that there's that potential that you were speaking of, Amir, that if you get people to think about like a genius poet or a novelist together, that gives them a third thing to think about, not just one another. And from that empathic state to go back and rebuild a society where they can really go on living like that, not just have it in the classroom.
Stephanie: Michael, can I jump in here?
Michael: You bet.
Stephanie: Okay. This is really interesting, you guys, and I think the work that you're doing is quite wonderful. I do want to tie this into larger questions of peace and nonviolence. And at Metta, we often talk about the importance of raising the human image as far as building a more nonviolent world and a more nonviolent culture. When we have low self-esteem about ourselves, it's a really easy space for us to act without reflection, without awareness, and to harm others, harm the planet, and we harm ourselves as well. So raising the human image is a key aspect of our work. And it feels like to study literature and works of great genius, as you say, that it's a kind of a stealth way of helping to raise the human image because what's really expected of young people today isn't very much, right? It's social media, it's consumerism, it's division, perhaps political ideologies, but not reflective politics. So it really seems to me that this is a stealth way into raising the human image by both preserving great culture and also being able to question culture while you're doing it. Can you speak to this and maybe what you've seen in your work with students?
Kanstantsin: Yeah. I just immediately am thinking about this incident I had recently. I was having this course on short stories, and I decided to assign a film because I felt like students were zealous enough to do some additional work. And I'm very much learning about film myself. I'm not a very cinematographic person. But I assigned this film by this Japanese director, Ozu, his last name is. Tokyo Story, which is old film and it's very slow and it's two and a half hours and it's always shot, one of the unique things about that film is that it's always shot from a static perspective. The camera never moves. All the shots are very slow, continuous and static. And I assigned it and I thought to myself, "Oh, this is going to be so hard for the poor students." It just takes a lot of endurance, although the movie is very beautiful. But I barely can have the endurance to watch it. And then we were discussing the film, and one of the students from Mexico, who was really talented and wonderful student, she said, "I have this intense TikTok addiction, and watching this film for the first time made me realize that I can pay attention to something for longer than three minutes." And she didn't really say anything about the film as such, although there are many things to be said about it, but it felt like just the format of watching a slow film was new enough to her that it taught her a lot, just that experience.
So in some way, my broad position these days when I teach is just that I want to teach old things that have endured through time because I think growing up in contemporary culture, in my experience, I didn't grow up in a particularly intellectual environment, I would say. Both of my families are working people. Sorry, both of my parents are working people, educated in the Soviet Union, engineers, very kind of practically-minded people. So I'm very much a black sheep in my family at least. And my experience was that I had no idea about the fact that the past had anything valuable at all. I grew up in this kind of just constant consumption of things that were, like, coming out. New films in the cinema or social media that just immediately becomes new and old as well. So to me, there is something important about just exposing younger people to older things and showing them that the past has just so much richness and so much gems hidden in it that you just cannot find in the present time oftentimes. So that, to me, is very important, and I feel like my students are constantly fascinated by that, that they discover that there is just wonderful things in the past, that they're just lying dormant and unnoticed for most of the time.
Michael: This is just a minor thing to throw in, but Kanstantsin, there is a study that showed in the early days of filmmaking, we're talking commercial Hollywood films, when they were still silent, there were eight film scene changes per minute, and then that went to 16, and that went to 24 and up. And as people's attention span gets shorter and shorter, it gets harder for them to be empathic with one another. So that's a very damaging thing that the industry has done, and that we should be changing that. And as Stephanie says, that's a kind of a stealth approach. People won't notice that it has something to do with peace until it's too late. Suddenly they have empathy for their former enemies.
Amir: That's interesting. I never thought about it in this way. So are you saying, Michael, that something along the lines that empathy is a longer term and timeline feeling? And in order to be able to feel empathic, like, you somehow need to actually let yourself feel it. Like, you cannot feel empathic in a TikTok video. Is that what you're saying?
Michael: I'm trying to say something. I would accept that, but I want to add a little something that the mere length of the... Okay, let's put it this way. The slower we think, the more positive thoughts we tend to have. The faster we think, the more isolated from one another, alienated, and eventually violent. So the movie industry, they didn't want to make us more violent, they just wanted to make more money. But they found that by speeding up and speeding up, the films became very, quote, "popular", but they had no idea how damaging it was.
Amir: I'm curious,I think that aside from the mediums that we use, that we're using, which are great books or other forms of great art, it also really matters the way we do it. And just because so much of the world today is very judgmental towards teenagers; and many teenagers, and I myself was one of them, grew up thinking that they are not, maybe not good enough. Not good enough is too general of a thing, but not good enough at math or not good enough at, I don't know, school and they get-- I was told multiple times by my teachers that I won't be successful in life because I don't do my homework and so on. And I myself and other teenagers grew up believing in this, slowly starting to believe in this, and thus having much lower self-esteem and thinking of themselves much lower than they actually are.
And for instance, in one of our courses in Santa Fe, we particularly worked with a group of teenagers from juvenile justice system. And those particularly, you would talk to them and after our classes, and they would be surprised, they themselves would be surprised that they actually said something that other people, their peers said, "Oh, wow. Yeah, that makes sense." They were themselves so surprised that they actually have something in them that they didn't know what to do with it. And that is because not of who they are, but because of what other people tell them. And it's such a powerful thing to me, and I don't want to pick what's more powerful, but it is a very important aspect of Socratic method that just because, again, you are trained, and you are asked to share your thoughts and try to think as hard as you can. Yes, nine out of 10 times you will say something that will make some sense, sometimes won't make sense at all, but this one time out of ten, you will say something very revealing to other people, and they will show it. They will say it just because they're so into a conversation, and that, I don't think we do it for self-esteem, but it definitely shows you that you are an agent in the world, and you are yourself also capable of producing thoughts and actions. And that, I think, is a very powerful tool to see this human image in you and then in others as well.
Kanstantsin: I think it's a very fruitful comment you're making. I think one thing that's positively similar in what we do to Socrates, as we get his image from Platonic writings, is that we really are trying to work out some idea. And that kind of tension of not understanding but feeling like there is something to understand is really, I think, what's driving the seminar. And I feel like it wouldn't work if we didn't have that direction of understanding. I feel like just a conversation, although it's very helpful and there are many things to learn about just how to converse with each other in the first place. But it seems like people really, as Aristotle maintained in the first line of Metaphysics, everyone desires to know, by nature. And I just wonder if that's something that we're picking up on. The truth of that statement really reveals itself in our, I think, work very powerfully.
And something we do just practically to share a little insight from how the seminar is usually run. At St. John's, usually how it would work is that there is an assignment, usually a rather long one, a book like Meno, Platonic dialogue Meno. Everyone reads it in advance, and then usually there are two tutors. That's just a name for the professors who are at the opposing ends of this oval table. So it has a kind of theatrical aspect to it. And both of them would ask one opening question. So there'd be one opening question to start the discussion. And then the discussion develops and other questions come about, and the tutors direct the discussion a little bit.
What we changed a little bit in our project is that we ask everyone, every student, to prepare an opening question. And we ask all of them to share one in the beginning. And then since it's on Zoom, oftentimes these days unfortunately, it actually allows us to put all the questions in the chat and then you can come back to them, which is convenient. And what I notice students realize quite quickly is that they actually can come up with a pretty good question, and it makes you read very differently when you're reading for the sake of a question and not for the sake of an answer, I think, because you really lack of understanding and pay attention to it. And yeah, very quickly I think people really start reading differently, realizing that they have fruitful things to say and to ask. And yeah, that's, as Amir previously said, a powerful realization.
Stephanie: Yeah, absolutely. That's really wonderful. And I feel like it's also, I don't want to take away from what you're saying about having the sense of discovery and curiosity over knowing there's something here to know. But it also feels like working with anybody, but especially young people, that they're living in a culture where they're competing for attention. And so to have a sense that others care about them and want to know what they think, and that they'll have the space where they'll get attention, not just on what they're wearing or what they have, but their questions, their curiosity, in a space that invites them to slow down, it just sounds so healthy for the mind. And I think that it's just so refreshing to find spaces in culture that are healthy for the mind, because what's healthy for the mind is often healthy for the spirit.
Amir?: The only problem is that they cannot prepare for it. Because, right, you were saying that they care about social media. They prepare their posts, they prepare what they wear. But in a conversation, you really... Of course, they think about what they say, but it's something that is natural, because you don't have time. You prepare for the reading, but as all of us would probably want to know how the seminar will go, there is no way you can prepare for it. So you're, I don't want to say naked, but you're... the conversation can go anywhere, and they suddenly live or go through living in an environment where they're unprotected by social stigmas and social stereotypes that they try to fit. And it's not only teenagers are going through that. I am going, and all of us are going. But seminar helps you forget that for a moment. And all that they know about you is your name and your country and that's it.
Michael: There was a very good teacher, I think he was an English teacher. His name was Ken McCrory. Ken McCrory. And he got very concerned about his students and how to reach them, and he developed this practice. He would never make a negative comment on the first assignment, no matter how bad it was. Because the point was to first establish a rapport, a relationship, with a student where they felt heard and felt that their ideas mattered. Then you could go on and do anything. But if you start right from the first assignment making corrections, saying, "This was no good," the student gets defensive. But thanks for talking about that, Amir, because I haven't thought about that for a long time.
Kanstantsin: Yeah, and maybe I can add a little bit just because I have some on the ground experience of interacting with students recently. And the AI problem I think is very tangible for everyone who has anything to do with teaching in any part of the world. And I was wondering at some point, is it as bad with international students as it is in the United States? Because I taught in New York for a little bit, and, it's just as bad, which is a very frustrating realization, and sometimes even worse. But it's interesting that actually the seminar format, and I didn't expect that to be the case, makes it so blatantly obvious when someone is using AI just because you're in front of a camera. Some kind of just like a really artificial statement basically that wouldn't typically have much depth to it. I would usually try to spot them and have a conversation with them. But I think it's revealing, I hope, to students who are using AI or have the temptation to use it, which I think is very common these days, to just see that you can actually have a wonderful experience learning without using any technology. And it's quite a rare thing to realize these days, unfortunately.
Stephanie: And the conversation about AI and also this work, it really is pointing back to this idea of the importance of critical thinking and the role of critical thinking in peace building. So we've been really... We've been dipping a little bit into some Hannah Arendt recently, like Origins of Totalitarianism and so forth, and she's just reinforcing that the critical faculty of mind is so important because totalitarianism requires of us to dull our capacity for critical thinking, and that we should never fear critical thinking because it's; inwardly, it's like a check and balance system where we have an idea. She says no ideas are dangerous in the end because we have a critical faculty. So the idea comes in, we think about it, there's a part of us that says, "That's not going to work. That's not ideal. That's not going to serve me. It's not going to serve this." But when we turn that faculty off, that's when totalitarianism becomes possible. That's when we get in line. That's when we do horrible things. So to anything that we can do, which is asked of us by AI, asks us to turn off our critical thinking. Social media asks us to turn off our critical thinking. Often politics ask us to turn off our critical thinking. Movies, media asks us to turn off our critical thinking quite a bit, especially Hollywood. So we're just, we're surrounded by the instruments of totalitarianism all the time because they're asking us to turn that faculty off. And so what I see that this program and programs like yours are doing is, again, this stealth way of working against this culture of potential totalitarianism. That's what I think.
Kanstantsin: I think I'm with you right there. I think I understand the question much better now. I think the way we address it, and so has St. John's, and I would go so far perhaps as to make a statement that modern education in general, is quite totalitarian in the ways that it tries to grow in us. And the way we try to counter that is we're quite radical with even going so far as, I don't know, reading a Wikipedia page about an author, or we ask students to not research what the book is about or what are the main themes of the book.
Because we think it's so important, and this is something that we borrow from St. John's, we think it's so important to first learn how to formulate your own ideas, your own understandings of any material before you... not infect, but before you put the ideas of others who spent much more time studying the book or studying the materials. And of course, I don't mean to say that we don't need teachers and we don't need to have experts in the fields. But I think education today got simplified to just hearing the end right away, hearing the answer without learning at least how the person got to it. I'm not even speaking about trying to get there yourself. And of course, so much of our world today is compiled of answers, of ready-made answers. Starting from cooking to sports to social media, you have an answer everywhere. Rarely you're asked to actually try to get there yourself. And that, of course, grows a citizen in any country, be it Russia or America or... that can't really think for themselves. That instantly Googles, that instantly in GPTs, I'm sorry, and so on. And I guess it is an aspect of critical thinking, an important one, to be able to make opinions about work that is just your own, and be wrong many times, but it is something. And because then it lets you filter what the government wants you to think and what you think. It goes to all areas of life, and I think it's so important, and [Hannah Arendt] was very right about what she noticed a long time ago.
Michael: Gandhi was astounding at this very capacity to encourage people to follow out their ideas and their beliefs, even though he knew that those beliefs were wrong. Because he felt it was more important for people to be able to think for themselves in the long run. So his friends would be astounded when he would encourage people who were disagreeing with him rather than telling them, "No, it has to be this way." Because he had faith that people, if they could think for themselves, would eventually get to the truth.
Stephanie: You're here at Nonviolence Radio, and that was myself and my co-host, Michael Nagler, speaking with Amir Bergen and Kanstantsin Tsiarokhin. They are founders of the Svet Peace Project. You can find their work at svetpeace.org. And they're working with young people to engage critical thinking, thought processes that go across divisions. And from October 17th to November 7th this fall, they're going to host a new course on Xenophon's Anabasis, a soldier's march through the ancient world, online for ages 14 to 19 years old, and it looks really interesting. I'm just going to quickly read the description.
More than two thousand years ago, a Greek soldier named Xenophon found himself stranded deep in enemy territory after his commanders were killed, and had to help lead ten thousand men home on foot across hostile deserts and mountains. His account of that march, the Anabasis, is one of the oldest adventure stories we have, written by someone who actually lived it.
In this course, we read and discuss the Anabasis together. There are no lectures. Participants lead the discussion, and the tutor guides attention and helps the group enter a conversation with the text.
There's a course fee, but there are full scholarships for any student who can't pay. And if there's a young person in your life and you care about them thinking about deep topics and thinking going beyond differences, this would be a great project to connect them with, svetpeace.org.
And now let's turn to some of our Nonviolence Report with Michael Nagler.
Michael: Thank you, Stephanie. And that mention of Xenophon reminds me of something that he said, which is, "The gods have given us all the knowledge that we need, and what we can never know is because we don't need to." And, that strikes me today because of something about the searching for knowledge, you know, with no limits. It reminds me that one of the researchers at Anthropic AI, which we were just talking about, he quit because he was warning that there's a 10% chance of "An extinction-level event happening because of rogue AI." And so how much have we learned? Back in 1945, when the Trinity test was exploded in Alamogordo, New Mexico; the scientists calculated that there was a 2 to 3% chance that the explosion would ignite the oxygen in the atmosphere and annihilate life on Earth. But they just went ahead with it anyway. So what are we thinking?
But to put in a good finding from science, which is relevant recently because of the, I suppose now fading interest in The Odyssey. But scientists have, you know, puzzled over why Neanderthals went extinct when we didn't, and one of them said recently that Neanderthals seem to have been very creative, but not very friendly to strangers. Now, put that up against the quote from Augustine that I started with a long time ago. Being friendly to strangers, being open-minded to people, being empathic towards them is a life survival skill. It's not just something that makes you feel good.
Stephanie: I feel like we ran into a Neanderthal on the road today then, who was showing me their middle finger as they were going around the car.
Michael: No self-respecting Neanderthal would do that. Anyway, I'd like us to have in our hearts, two projects that are going on. One, the flotilla is sailing again toward Gaza. They have determined over and over, despite brutal treatment when they were arrested the last time: beatings, humiliations, et cetera. I won't go into details, but this kind of brutality seems not to hold back real peace activists, but to stimulate them to even further efforts. And so they're off again, and our hearts and prayers should go with them.
And at the same time, with five young people whose names I'm going to read out now, Daniel Tatlow-Devally, Leandra Rollo, Vi Kovarbasic, Crow Tricks, and Zo Hailu. Why am I holding them up for our support? Because they are known as the Ulm 5, and they're right now on trial in Stuttgart, Germany, for property destruction is what we would call it. We discussed this in connection with animal rights, but here they are going into the Elbit factories in Ulm, which is Israeli-owned and produces weapons for the ongoing genocide in Gaza, and they did about a million pounds worth of damage. And they're on trial in Stuttgart, and the interesting thing is that they're being treated as violent terrorists. They're behind bulletproof glass, and every precaution is being taken, even though these young people, when they had done what they felt they had to do, they stayed there waiting to be arrested. So it was perfect civil disobedience, and the German state is responding with perfect incomprehension and violence.
Well, let me mention three resources that have come on board recently. There's a venerable institution in this country, War Resisters League and War Resisters International, and they have brought out a really remarkable book called New Worlds in Old Shells. I find this little book nothing short of inspiring. They're citing what's going on. Grassroots forms, for example, of non-hierarchical organizing, which are close to things that happen in nature. So there's an example of biomimicry. They talk about community land trusts, CLTs, and say that there are 600 of them worldwide, which means the growth of trusteeship as the nonviolent equivalent of ownership, as we spent a month on that topic in our year-long course recently. So these are wonderful institutions, the CLTs. They're helping who they call non-rich people, in which community I consider myself to belong, helping them afford homes, healthcare, et cetera. And incidentally, there's an interesting connection between healthcare and organizing for systemic change, because a lot of communities have banded together to help people who don't have access to the healthcare they need, and then gone beyond that saying, why has the system failed them? And what can we do about the system to prevent that kind of thing?
The extent of wonderful, creative, sustainable projects are going on worldwide and in this country is, like I say, it's simply inspiring. And it brought up for me the image that I've shared with some people of the iodine crystal, where back in the day when there was a lot of water up in the clouds and it wasn't raining, people would go up in planes above the clouds and pour out iodine crystals, and they would somehow precipitate rain. So what is the iodine crystal that would precipitate a collective, unstoppable movement of all of these wonderful people doing such wonderful things? Well, if you have an answer to that question, friends, please let us know at the Metta Center.
But, in addition to New Worlds in Old Shells, I wanted to mention something online, the Whirlwind Institute, which is being done by our friends Mark and Paul Engler of Waging Nonviolence. They are so creative. And one thing they said recently, that the key to defeating the present regime is mass non-cooperation. And they said, "Studying the field of civil resistance gives insight into the level of popular organizing needed to repel assaults on democracy." So that knowledge would be the equivalent of my iodine crystal.
Now, here closer to home, one county over, David Hoffman from the Interfaith Council of Sonoma County is hosting a training next month, October, the month of Gandhi's birthday, on nonviolent de-escalation. And you can find it, Interfaith Council of Sonoma County online, and find out about that course.
Well, I want to point out that this is World Wellness Weekend, September 18th through 20th, and around the world, millions of people are practicing wellness activities at over 11,000 venues. I think this kind of awareness of what people are doing in so many different places to converge on a given topic is new and very, very rewarding. It's good to find out about. And they say, the promoters of this weekend, that wellness strategies are nonviolent solutions. That, of course, caught my attention. Nonviolent solutions that encourage us to practice self-care through movement, sleep, nutrition, creativity, spirituality, solidarity, and purpose. And they say it's a way of practicing nonviolence toward our whole being. This is a wonderful dimension to add to the definition of positive nonviolence, that it is a way of living and not just a technique of resisting.
So much more I'd like to share with you friends. Hope to talk to you again in a couple of weeks.
Stephanie: Yes. Thank you so much, Michael. Thanks to our guests today from the Svet Peace Project, to our mother station, KWMR, to everybody who helps make the show possible. Find it at nonviolenceradio.org.
And until the next time, everybody, please take care of one another.
We'll be back in two weeks.