Article 33. Violence and Non-Violence

Confidence should be non-violence based in all our eating, shopping and talking regimes so that when relating to somebody, we aren’t even thinking about using violence or force of any kind. That’s the theory! In reality, we need to be full of direction and decision making drive. We don’t want to be seen as indecisive, especially when engaged in the serious matter of shopping.
Our confidence as consumers is shown in what we buy. To buy, we must to some extent comply with certain institutionalised practices so that we can take advantage of them. Although we curse the TV ads, we accept them all the same, because they tell us what’s out there to buy. We secretly support the promoting of commodities because we use them. We even come to enjoy the bright chirpy sales pitch that goes with something we want. We can identify with the promotion and admire the confidence of the advertiser, often in marked contrast to our own confused level of confidence.
The upshot: we may say we hate violence but we allow a lot of it into our lives. Often unnoticed. It doesn’t help matters if we doubt non-violence itself. In our society it isn’t taken seriously. It’s a bit whimpish. It seems ineffective even though we know violence is ugly and eventually always fails. We need to be sure that non-violence will bring us success, so if we go for it (become vegan) we need to feel it in our hearts not just our heads. I’ve often asked myself how I can check if I’m really becoming more violence-free, in that boastful ‘proud-to-be-vegan’ sense.
Perhaps we ultimately get to know what we’ve become by consulting animals. Animals know things! They smell things a thousand times better than humans and see things clearer than we do. They often have an uncanny knowledge about us and show it if they happen to be in a relationship with us. I’m mainly speaking about our cats and dogs at home. They show us things which we often find most illuminating. We see it in the way they approach us. They aren’t pre-set. They haven’t worked everything out before they do it. Importantly, unlike we humans, they are not judgmental.
When they know us, they have things to tell us. Things that we can’t rely on humans to tell us. The truth about ourselves. An accurate appraisal of how we are doing (on our progress towards non-violence). This is when we consult animals. They are masters when it comes to discerning a peaceful person, being drawn towards them and attracted to our affectionate nature because it denotes trust. To cats and dogs and many other animals we can be close to, this is value number one. Having suffered so badly from human violence throughout the ages, animals, wild or domestic, have become arbiters of good taste in the matter of harmlessness.
Needless to say, animals are different to us. No hubris, no superiority and (mainly amongst wild animals) no doubt about how dangerous humans can be. Their senses are impeccable. But they can’t judge everything about us because we are so very different from them. Unlike animals, we are aware of a future and we project it. We try to improve things. But with that comes the violence of maintaining our position of dominance over animals and that above all things, has led to humans becoming unstuck. The damage we’ve done has come from trying to improve things the hard-nose way. We’ve never learnt to ‘be content with our lot’. We realise at the eleventh hour that manipulation and bullying have fulfilled us in the short term but brought us to the brink of catastrophe. Now, some of us want to turn in a completely different direction. But it’s like steering a massive ocean going liner 180 degrees. It has so much momentum that to swing it round may have to be a much slower process than we’d like. So we have to see far ahead, beyond our own lifetime, to future generations of responsibility-takers, warriors of non-violence. For us here today, our job is to set the ground work and try to solve the eternal conundrum – when is dynamic too aggressive and when is non-violence too ineffective?
Non-violence has always seemed a bit passive, as if not effective enough to eliminate violence. But perhaps that’s the point – we shouldn’t want to kill off anything and that includes violence itself. Instead we should accept that one lives alongside the other. It’s the nature of the planet. Living alongside disease is a healthy battle-worn immune system. The disease is the attacker, the other the defender. In the violence of nature, we experience a blowing gale and see a stalk of wheat bending but not breaking in the wind. It’s in the tension between opposites. It’s the nature of life on earth, but it’s also the push-me-pull-you of our own mental processes. Only our native intelligence can prevent violence creeping in unnoticed or our non-violence becoming too cocky. As observers, we should notice the nature of these two elements; that non-violence confronts and then withdraws; that violence confronts and gets out of control.
Non-violence dances with violence. It lets the violence-based world make its impact (as it’s done so spectacularly so far) then burn itself out, whereupon it steps in to take its place and makes a different sort of impact. At this point in time, post-violent twentieth century, the time has come to consider human-devised violence as passé. If we are still clinging onto violence in any way, it’s because it was passed-down to us, as a way of getting things done. Violence became routine and as we emerge from a dark century, we step into another in urgent need of non-violence. Today, the ways of solving our problems by way of non-violence remain largely untested. They’re still raw and unknown. So patience is needed to come to terms with non-violence and if it attracts us as the panacea of our age, then we mustn’t run with it before we can walk with it.