Non-Violence - Can We Practice It, A Talk to the Katahdin Center
by Rosalie PaulEvery last Sunday of the month, the Katahdin Center will host discussions of the Green Party's Ten Key Values at the Highlands in Topsham. This was the first in that series. For more information, call 443-9005.
Violence is deeply rooted. Western culture has been based on dominance for at least several thousand years. Governments, institutional churches, and economic systems use violence to gain and maintain power over resources and they do it so commonly that we see it as inevitably human rather than as a choice.
Strength and power are defined as qualities of muscle rather than of wisdom.
The quiet presence of non-violence can reveal the negative face of violence as the fear of losing control.
Non-violence can reverse cultural expectations that violence is the only way.
Non-violence is based on nurturance rather than dominance. It seeks to empower rather than to have power over. It looks through the heart as well as the mind and it thinks in cycles as well as in linear patterns.
Violence never solves problems for the long term. Whether domestic violence or international violence, it serves to control, destroy and conquer for the short term. It stirs up the urge for retaliation from the loser and creates continuing violence.
Non-violence looks at the root of conflict and works to create cooperation among participants on all "sides" so that solutions will serve the needs of all over the long term.
Many people are suspicious of non-violence. Violence is the human condition, they say. Violence keeps foreigners from taking our jobs, it controls dictators like Saddam Hussein. Only recently have we thought it unacceptable to say that violence makes children obedient and keeps women in their place, though those expectations are still commonplace in many parts of the world.
We know in our hearts, when we look at our families, that violence is a dis-order. It is the last resort of people who lack confidence in themselves as spiritual beings. None of us is unfamiliar with anger and fear, and restraint isn't easy but, thinking of it at the family level, it's easy to see violence as a negative force. Not only is it morally abhorrent but it doesn't solve problems; it doesn't work. We can look at institutional violence through the same clear lens.
In elementary schools, the bully is sent to the principal's office. In adult societies, the bully is in charge.
Non-violence is patient and demands patience from us. It urges us to put aside dominance. The lessons of the past 40 years, learned from the environmental movement and the feminist movement, make nurturance part of our everyday language. It's no longer a radical idea. There is a new groundswell of understanding and a new readiness to build "care" into common practice and to insist upon it at all levels of society. This is a good time to be a peacemaker.
Back to Peace Talk Index, December 2000