Censored 2014 (56 page)

More positively, Aram Jamal Sabir, the executive director of the Kurdish Institute for Elections, reported: “I can't tell you exactly when I started to believe in nonviolence—sometime during all the wars and violence here. . . . I saw that violence didn't change the situation. In any person there is some humanity. Nonviolence tries to develop that part of a person.”
²³

In other words, nonviolence, being perfectly in sync with human destiny, not only conveys a deep sense of fulfillment on the activist but also helps to awaken the opponent and the broader public.

The explosive quantitative and qualitative growth of nonviolence in the few decades since Gandhi and King
²⁴
thus takes its place beside the birth of new science and the recovery of ancient wisdom as a potent factor in the change that David Korten, Joanna Macy, and others have referred to as the Great Turning.
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Now that political science has begun looking at this phenomenon, we already have some impressive studies of its efficacy to dislodge oppressive regimes. But the growth of nonviolence, and knowledge about it, has not only political but also cultural and even evolutionary significance.

The Earth Story

Of the three intersecting stories that comprise this new narrative, the ecological has been the most recognized and thus requires less review here—not that solving the problem of global climate disruption is not urgent! In fact, it's the most urgent task in the category Joanna Macy identified as “stopping the worst of the damage.” But its primary urgency is to preserve the nourishing capacity of the Earth so as to cradle the continuation of the great experiment called life. Indeed, as Vandana Shiva has stated, “If you stop the pollution in people's minds, they will stop their pollution of the environment.”
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While we must stop mountaintop removal, the Keystone XL pipeline, etc.—and quickly!—the “worst of the damage” has been industrial civilization's damage to the human image.
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The desacralization of Earth that Carolyn Merchant called the “death of nature,” which began at the dawn of the industrial revolution, meant that the ancient myth of a living earth was deliberately, if not always consciously, deconstructed. This process must be reversed, for even if the modern mind cannot reimagine earth as actually living, we can at least regain a
respect
for life, and by extension, for our planet's exquisite life-support system. Along with that reimag-ining must come a change in the collective psyche that creates our vulnerability to greed by propagating a misleading image of ourselves as empty physical beings in need of fulfillment from outside objects. When he was only twenty-two years old, the great modern Indian sage Ramana Maharshi replied to a questioner: “Happiness is the very nature of the Self. There is no happiness in any object of the world.”
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Fuller awareness of this fundamental fact of our nature, which is at present rigorously obscured by advertising and other aspects of our culture, would point us to the end to our extractive economy and the way we're despoiling the Earth to service it.
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The Person Story

We now begin to see through the critical lens: our human image. As Huston Smith said years ago, “For our culture as a whole, nothing major is going to happen until we figure out who we are. The truth of the matter is . . . we haven't a clue who we are today.”
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Or rather, we have imposed on ourselves a theory that violates our deepest intuitions and is ultimately a travesty of what science, wisdom traditions, and our own best judgment are saying. Ancient Indian tradition offers a set of potent formulas called
mahāvākyas
(“core statements”), which encapsulate the vision of reality that the Vedanta had created— for example,
prajñānām brahma,
“All reality is consciousness.”
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We might try to set out a few core statements for our present age even though we may not be able to match the
mahāvākyas'
brevity; that takes time, and genius. Supported as they are by science and wisdom, and offered here with confidence, we nonetheless treat them as hypotheses to be lived and tested in the living.

▸ We are not merely material beings. To use a popular formula: we are body, mind, and spirit, but spirit (consciousness) is our first and fundamental identity.

▸ We are not separate, despite appearances. All of us—for that matter, all of life—is one, and this oneness can be discovered in the depths of our consciousness.

▸ We are not violent by nature. We have a
capacity
for violence inherited from our evolutionary past, but just as cooperation is a more potent driver of evolution than competition, compassion in us leads to more long-lasting change than hatred. Injustice and cruelty are not absent from our world, but they are not fundamental to it. Life doesn't punish; it teaches.
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We are not determined by our DNA, our hormones, or our neu-rotransmitters any more than we are by the position of the stars or anything outside of us: we make our own destiny primarily with our
will.

▸ We are not a finished product. The miraculous human body that has taken five billion years to evolve (since the emergence of life-forms on this planet) may have reached a plateau—for instance, it may not be possible to run a three-minute mile— but we are far from realizing the full potential of our
consciousness.
(Except that some of us have: Jesus, the Buddha, and, as thought by many people in our own age, Mahatma Gandhi, and a handful of other women and men of realization, who represent what each of us can become.)

WHAT'S KEEPING THE OLD STORY ALIVE?

It's interesting to observe how the new story is struggling to be told in the shell of the old. For example, Barbara Fredrickson, developing an important aspect of positive psychology, has written an important book called
Love 2.0: How Our Supreme Emotion Affects Everything We Feel, Think, Do, and Become,
but the headline of a review on
AlterNet
tells exactly the opposite (and depressingly familiar) story: “Your Brain on Love: The Fascinating
Biochemical Reactions That Make Sparks Fly”
(emphasis added).
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Even on this otherwise quite progressive blog, the categories
used to frame this scientific finding are taken from the old, materialistic narrative.While it is virtually ubiquitous in public discourse, the most effective medium imposing this inhibiting and demoralizing narrative is modern advertising. Examples abound: an old advertisement touts a brand of cigarettes as “alive with pleasure,” or a more recent picture of some diamond rings carries the label, “This is what extraordinary love looks like.” Bear in mind that, according to recent studies, we are ex-posed to between 3,000 to 5,000 of these commercial messages a day; their cumulative impact—including their underlying “story,” or message of a self that is empty, needing fulfillment from the outside world, separate from others and the environment—cannot be ignored.

The six-part BBC documentary
Century of the Self
demonstrates the power of advertising—including, for example, how the Nazis enthusiastically adopted advertising techniques in their propaganda with devastating clarity that we needn't elaborate on here. Those who have become alarmed by Citizens United, the Supreme Court-approved doctrine that corporations have the same rights as natural persons, have mainly been roused by its baleful consequences for democracy, as well they should; but even if corporations never take advantage of this court's ruling to sway political decisions, the decision still does serious harm by propagating a shallow, inert image of personhood, which has come to dominate our collective sense of self.

An earlier version of
Century of the Self
was called
Happiness Machines,
borrowing from a quote by President Herbert Hoover, who fell all over himself to offer this fulsome praise to a group of advertisers: “You have taken over the job of creating desire, and have
transformed people into
constantly moving happiness
machines
—machines which have become the key to economic progress” (emphasis added).
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Since Hoover's time, as audiences have become more and more desensitized and indoctrinated to this message of their own dehuman-ization, advertisers have become increasingly forthright about transferring humanity to inanimate objects. “Meet Gwen,” invites a billboard. Gwen likes music and good restaurants. But there's a problem: “Gwen” is a smartphone. This is not a joke. Recall that the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were given the cute, euphemistic, and equally pseudo-personal names “Little Boy and “Fat Man,” while the cities they destroyed were referred to not as cities but “targets.”

Reviewing Nick Turse's Vietnam War book,
Kill Anything That Moves,
Chris Hedges describes how “the god-like power that comes with the ability to destroy . . . along with the intoxicating firepower of industrial weapons, rapidly turns those who wield these weapons into beasts.
Human beings are reduced to objects”
(emphasis added).
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The degradation inflicted by these messages is double-edged, injuring first oneself, and then the intended victim.
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Conflict scientists have long recognized that dehumanization is a fundamental precondition of violence; indeed to deny the humanity of another and/or oneself is a kind of spiritual violence in itself. From dehumanization to inhumanity is a short step.

Dehumanization begins long before an army recruit shouts in unison for his drill sergeant that the purpose of a bayonet is to “kill, kill, kill without mercy.” As is well known, before becoming California's governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger starred in a particular type of action film. According to a
New Yorker
profile of Stan Winston, whose special effects studio designed monsters and robots for these movies, Winston found it exciting to “scare the crap out of people.”
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This sounds uncomfortably similar, does it not, to the way governments try to keep us cowed and in line? For instance, in 1947 when the American people
were
turning from militarism in disgust, Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg told President Harry S. Truman that if he wanted to rearm he would have to “scare the hell out of the American people.”
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But the Winston studio team was convinced that their projects were humanitarian.
The New Yorker
account also quoted Donald Norman, a professor of computer science and psychology and “an influential writer on technological design.” According to Norman, “Robots need to display their emotions so that humans will be able to tell at a glance what's going on inside them.”
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Emotions? Inside
them? And, according to Cynthia Breazeal, an MIT computer scientist who collaborated with Wintston, in countries like the US and Japan where demand for elder care is projected to surpass the supply of caretakers, “The solution could be a sociable robot, something that lives with you and that you can have a
meaningful emotional
relationship with.”
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To seriously believe that you can have a meaningful relationship with a machine epitomizes our civilization's pathology. It is perhaps the worst possible delusion, for it becomes all too easy to dehumanize
persons in a culture that dehumanizes
personhood.

FROM THE CULTURAL TO THE POLITICAL

Nonviolent Peaceforce (NP) is a remarkable organization that places trained, unarmed field team members in select regions of conflict. It's now a seven million dollar worldwide organization with teams in five countries. When NP was just getting underway, I had lunch with a colleague, a distinguished political scientist with a special interest in peace, which was not commonplace in that discipline. I explained to Ernie what NP and other nonviolent intervention groups were doing (the field is now known as Unarmed Civilian Peacekeeping): such groups had rescued child soldiers; offered “protective accompaniment” to hundreds of threatened human rights workers in Latin America and elsewhere; stood ready to interpose themselves, if necessary, in outbreaks of fighting—all without losing a single member. “Fascinating, Mike,” he said, with genuine interest.

So I said, “Let's put together a seminar and I can share this with some of your colleagues.”

“No,” he said.

No? Wouldn't his colleagues want to know about an earthshaking development in their own field? After a few days I got over my shock and pressed Ernie to tell me why he thought they would not, and after thinking for a moment he put very simply: “That's not their culture.” Two decades on, it still isn't. Nor is it the culture of policy-makers, funders, or the millions of ordinary men and women who go into military “service” for a variety of personal reasons and one cultural one: in their worldview, there is no alternative to coercive force.

The debate between Democrats and Republicans is not taking place on a level playing field: politically conservative perspectives are premised on the old story, which is still the default notion of reality for a large majority in the industrialized world. For example, in this view, torturing our enemies may be acceptable if their suffering benefits us and hurts only them. However, recent findings in neuro-science suggest that inflicting pain is harmful to both victim and perpetrator alike.
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The prevailing story came into existence, after all, for political reasons: as my colleague Carolyn Merchant has shown in her
critical study,
The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution,
the rationalism of the “Enlightenment” was seized upon to supplant the image of “sacred Earth”
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and to replace it with the notion of Earth as an inert block of matter—thus making the industrial revolution possible, unleashing much despoliation of the earth, then by mines, and now by poisoning, climate disruption, mountaintop removal, and so on. David Korten, Joanna Macy, and other brilliant visionaries are now in effect trying to reverse that narrative shift, to restore the image of a living or sacred Earth. They are quite correct in pointing out that repressive forces are strongly invested in keeping the prevailing story of a lifeless Earth inhabited by human beings with no agency, who are radically dissociated from one another and the planet and thus fit victims of elite control and exploitation. This is why, when we come down to an “inexplicable” catastrophe like Iraq, Tom Hayden reported one member of Congress declaring, “Republicans can declare victory and leave, but the Democrats can only declare failure and be blamed.”
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