Article 35. The Work of Non-Violence

The most attractive feature of non-violence is that it is only interested in the bigger picture. That’s why it has no sense of timing. It can pop up at the most inconvenient times, like in the middle of a heated argument which is verging on a quarrel – someone outside breaks in to suggest that we “calm down”. We push them aside because we are convinced that our ‘good idea’ and the importance of it outweighs any need for calm. But as time passes, if things escalate into a personal slanging match, it’s only that call for calm which might have averted disaster. Only by applying the brakes in time, by going into repair and rescue mode, can we let the calming factor do its work. If we exclude it, violence ups the ante until an explosion is inevitable. After that it’s a long up-hill struggle to restore things. The calming element brings high emotions under control. It’s a sort of count-to-ten principle which is not meant to spoil our fun but to keep our dynamic urges under some sort of control. So, how dynamic should our non-violence be? Certainly we must never let it act as a dampener nor be afraid of robust interaction.
Take the violent world. In it, we always try to get what we want. We bend the rules and hope we can do the repairs later. But there’s another violent world in nature, where forceful events like storms, epidemics and earthquakes happen and destruction occurs on a massive scale. But this sort of violence isn’t the same as the human variety. Ours is damaging because it’s so coldly administered - driven by our sense of insecurity and therefore our own private ambitions. Only by implementing the principles of non-violence can we keep our own violence in check, whether it’s our own or that of our children, our partner’s or the collective consciousness itself. By checking ourselves for this and by observing our closest relationships, we can keep non-violent principles in touch with reality. Then we can watch them grow, probably at home first, within strong and loving relationships. Home should provide a relatively safe environment to test and trial non-violence before taking it into the outside world. Between our-most-familiar selves, anything goes. If the violence bug can be held back (with our partners and families at home) we can learn everything via praise, mockery and criticism, and the impact on our ego is softened by our intimacy with loved ones. Then we can get through our differences, perhaps more slowly than we’d like but more thoroughly. Hopefully, in this way we can design a creative life with those we love to be with, by watching out for each other and by intending never to leave these other people behind. That experience at home can give us enough confidence to communicate in the outside world with strangers and even with the much-vilified public figures whom we love to hate. If only we could simply observe what they do without automatically aborting on them or bringing out the hate bugs to hurt them? Good old reliably judgmental humans!!
Today, we are so conscious of violence (largely through stories reported in the media) that we think most humans are violent, which of course they aren’t! These media stories bring what passes for interest into our dreary lives, giving us something to talk about. So we discuss violence and say how we dislike it, but as we become more interested in it, it sucks us in. Then we become disgusted by our own attraction to it and swing right over to the opposite side, into the sentimentality of non-violence, attracted by it’s passivity. We start to use it to escape when things get tough. It’s hard to tell what is really so attractive about non-violence because it requires a deal of altruism to lubricate it. Perhaps we are tempted to use it to deny reality. In legend, this is what happened to the Lemurian civilisation. They abhorred violence. They were incapable of dealing with it. They eventually died out. The moral of the story is that perhaps they tried to deny the very existence of violence without having a realistic alternative to it. Perhaps the Lemurians hadn’t thought deeply enough about the co-dependence of the two elements. Perhaps they hadn’t thought enough about the dynamic side of non-violence, which might have lifted them out of their passivity into the challenging activity of outwitting violence.
We have strategies today for the dynamic pacifist. We can implement a more sophisticated philosophy by boycotting violent activity wherever it is found. We can avoid using violent goods. We can encourage the use of things that are cruelty-free and environmentally friendly. It now comes to a matter of practising what we preach, building a non-violent society, commodity by commodity. Non-violence must percolate into everything we do, from thinking and talking to actively supporting cruelty-free goods. As this fashions takes off, violence and coercion will literally fade away. And no one need ever notice the transition or identify what it was that fundamentally changed our society. As long as those with a strong interest in non-violence set the example today for the habits of the future, we need only go about the business of installing these habits. And do it by tomorrow at the latest!