Planning for the far future

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Needless to say, animals are different to us - no hubris, no superiority and yet they might have no doubt about how dangerous humans can be. Their senses are impeccable, but they can’t know us completely because we are so very different from them. Unlike animals, we try to improve things and with that comes the violence of maintaining our position-of-dominance, over Nature and especially over animals. It’s brought them unstuck, as it has brought us unstuck too.

            The damage we’ve done has come from trying to improve things by wit, strength and ruthlessness. We’ve never learnt to ‘be content with our lot’. Our manipulation and bullying have brought us to the brink of catastrophe. There must be many humans today who are ashamed of what we’ve done and continue to do, to the environment and to animals in particular.

            Now, some of us want to turn that around, turn in a completely different direction.  We see the urgent need for repair, but it’s like steering an ocean liner 180 degrees; it has so much momentum that to swing it around is a very slow process.

            It’s likely that we have to look beyond our own lifetime, to future generations of responsibility-takers, who as true warriors of non-violence will see what ‘the violent approach’ has done to their elders. They’ll see the people of the past to be both primitive and callous.

            In the meantime however, for us here today, our job must be to lay the foundations of a society of people-to-come. And part of that is an attitudinal turn-around which wrestles with a conundrum between aggressive reform enforced by law, and non-violent persuasion which might be ineffective.

            Non-violence has always seemed a bit passive, as if not effective enough to eliminate violence. But perhaps that’s the glitch-point. Reformers are always in a hurry, and change, if it is to be permanent, might have to be slower that we want it to be. Even those with the best intentions aren’t necessarily patient or as peaceful as they think they are. The reality of our situation is that we shouldn’t want to kill off anything and that includes violence itself. It’s the nature of the planet. There’s violence everywhere. Within the body, alongside violent disease is a battle-worn immune system - disease attacks, immune system defends. Or in Nature, there’s a destructive storm and the stalk of wheat bends but doesn’t break in the wind. On this violent planet there’s tension between opposites. In our  human brain we have to be alert to violence creeping in unnoticed and be alert to our non-violence becoming too righteous.

            Non-violence dances with violence. The animal activist watches as the flame of violence burns itself out, and only then can we step in to oversee true change in human nature.

            At this point in time, after the worst extremes of violence during the twentieth century, we’re starting to look more carefully at non-violent solutions. If they come to be the modus operandi of our new age, then we have a chance to survive as a species. But first we have to learn to walk before we can run. And each of us who believe in non-violence must first practice it before we can effectively preach it.