Future of Conflict #15: Healing Resistance

This week I read Part I of Healing Resistance by Kazu Haga.

The book is an introduction and primer on Kingian (as in, MLK Jr.) nonviolence. There are a lot of worthwhile ideas in there, and I’m mainly leaning on the first third of the book for today’s episode, because otherwise there would be too much to cover. If you’re interested in how to apply Gandhi and King’s ideas for social change while avoiding traps around judgment, superiority, and virtue signaling, this book is worth reading.

Another reason I’ll focus on the first third of the book is that the basic principles of nonviolent that show up in the middle third are based on published works by MLK that are now at the top of my list. So we’ll cover them soon enough.

There’s four ideas I want to share today:

Non-violence vs. Nonviolence
Negative Peace vs. Positive Peace
Misconceptions I had about Nonviolence
Institutional Nonviolence

1. Non-violence vs. Nonviolence

Look again. Non-violence has a hyphen and nonviolence doesn’t. Fussing over the distinction in other peoples’ writing is pedantic but the underlying concept is essential.

Non-violence is the absence of violence. I’m not hitting or killing or yelling or turning the screws on some poor sod, so I’m non-violent (in this moment).

Nonviolence is what Gandhi wants you to do when faced with violence.

Kazu writes:

It is about what you are going to do about the violence and injustice we see in our own hearts, our homes, our neighborhoods, and society at large. It is about taking a proactive stand against violence and injustice. Nonviolence is about action, not inaction.

Nonviolence a literal translation of ahimsa (himsa being violence), but otherwise doesn’t have much going for it. Gandhi would sometimes translate ahimsa as “Love”, which is pretty overloaded in English and also not great.

The point is that nonviolence is active, courageous, and the result of a lot of training. It’s not just sitting on the coach not being violent. In practice, nonviolence involves doing the hard thing (speaking up, putting your body on the line, not reacting to insult) and exposing yourself to risk and danger.

2. Negative Peace vs Positive Peace

This is similar vocab public service announcement about two kinds of “peace”. There’s the peace that’s the absence of conflict because one side gave up fighting. And there’s another peace which means that the underlying tensions have been resolved.

Kazu writes:

Johan Galtung calls “negative peace,” a peace that describes the absence of tension that comes at the expense of justice.

while

Dr. King [said] that, “peace is not merely the absence of tension, but the presence of justice.”

So you can have a “peaceful marriage” or “peaceful occupation” because one side is so overwhelmed there is no question of dispute. But it’s not the kind of relationship anybody really wants to inhabit (including the side exercising power).

Getting these subtleties clear lays the groundwork for why you may and may not want to address a conflict.

Negative peace only looks peaceful. All the parties know the equilibrium is temporary and the shit will eventually hit the fan.

The kicker is that going from negative peace to positive peace usually does not look peaceful.

Dr. King was arrested twenty-nine times in his short life. Many of those times, he was charged with “disturbing the peace.”

There’s something just deliciously ironic about that.
Kazu prefers to call it “disturbing complacency”:

When we use nonviolence to confront violence and injustice, we are not disturbing the peace, we are disturbing complacency. We are disturbing the normalization of violence. We are disturbing negative peace.

3. Misconceptions I had about Nonviolence

I found these two misconceptions about nonviolence particularly powerful because I have them. I’m a guy who has been very interested in Gandhi since 1999. I’ve read many of his writings, spent a month walking in his footsteps, and spent years living in Gandhian communities. And I still fall into both of these traps:

3A: Misconception 1: It’s achievable

Gandhi described himself as a “votary of nonviolence”. But the noun is easily shifted into an adjective, and we think about nonviolence as something we can become.

Kazu has a great takedown here:

I don’t believe that one ever becomes nonviolent. Dr. King wasn’t nonviolent. Gandhi wasn’t nonviolent.

You and I are never going to become nonviolent, for the same reason that if you are a practitioner of karate, you never become karate.

Meditators don’t become meditation.
Going to yoga classes doesn’t make you yoga.

These are not things to become, but practices and lenses through which to view the world and skill sets that we utilize throughout our lives.

It is a worldview and a practice, not a destination.

Nonviolence should be viewed similarly. Not as something to become, but a worldview and a skill set in which we are trying to improve in. It is through the consistent practice of the art of nonviolence that we are able to build up our nonviolent muscles so that they may become useful in our daily lives.

If we think the destination is achievable, we are subject to frustration, disappointment, and ultimately quitting. In order to have fun playing the game, we have to know the game is infinite. Like meditation, or music, or relationship, or chess (maybe not exactly infinite, but infinite to me).

So the way to guarantee long-term commitment and practice is to accept a lifetime of learning (Othello, once again) at the outset.

3B: Misconception 1: It’s quick

Kazu started his career teaching two-day workshops on non-violence. Years later he learned the distinction between not punching somebody during a protest (non-violence) and the deep spiritual teaching of loving your enemy even as you use your body to block the harm they might do to someone else (nonviolence).

It’s Othello, not Connect 4.

No one goes to a four-hour karate seminar and thinks they’ve “got it.” It takes years of dedicated practice for skills learned in karate training to be useful in real-life combat situations.

Similarly, if you think you can sit calmly at a lunch counter while people throw pies in your face, call you the worst insults imaginable, and physically assault you and your friends without having trained for it, you are deceiving yourself.

This is partly because there’s some base-level brain chemistry and instinctual reactions to overcome:

For most of us, our natural reactions to violence fall into one of three categories: to fight, flight, or freeze.

Nonviolence gives us an alternative way of responding: to face.

Facing means looking your assailant in the eye, not backing down, not giving into fear, and not reacting in kind.

I don’t think I ever would have explicitly said, “I think nonviolence is easy to learn” or “I think I’ve figured it out”. But both of those points hit me hard, so I know I must have those beliefs kicking around (which seems totally unhelpful).

4. Institutional Nonviolence

Kazu’s teacher, Dr. Bernard LaFayette Jr., was a friend and colleague of Martin Luther King’s. On April 4, 1968, King’s parting words to LaFayette were:

You know Bernard, the next movement that we need to start is a movement to institutionalize and internationalize nonviolence.

Dr. King was assassinated later that day, and Dr. LaFayette spent his life fulfilling those orders.

We live in a society drenched in violence. We see it and experience all around us. From the media to our social hierarchies to our fear of what happens when we cross the line, we are trained from a young age to understand violence. We know when to fear it and when to use it.

Institutionalizing nonviolence means giving it enough cultural airtime so we understand its dynamics as much as we understand those of violence.

This what the organizers of the Nashville sit-ins did in 1960. Those actions were successful because the participants were rigorously trained for months by Reverend James Lawson, who had studied with Gandhi. It took months of simulations of verbal insults, throwing food, and physical assault before the leaders were ready to act.

Here’s another success story from a Chicago school in a neighborhood that “struggled with generations of violence”:

The school’s campaign to bring nonviolence to their two campuses started around the time that Chicago was getting national coverage for particularly high levels of violence. In the first year of their campaign, the school was able to reduce the rate of physical violence at their school by 70 percent at the height of the violence epidemic throughout the city.

How did they do it? By institutionalizing nonviolence.

The entire faculty was trained in nonviolence as part of their professional development, and they have refresher courses every other year. A group of student leaders receive a forty-hour training to become youth trainers every summer. These student leaders lead workshops for their peers throughout the year. The entire incoming freshman class receives a presentation on nonviolence by older students. Announcements about nonviolence are made over the PA systems.

The school got rid of their metal detectors and security guards and instead invested the savings into their students’ education. Nonviolence became as important on campus as math and science. It was embedded within the policies, practices, and culture of the entire school and became part of what the staff and students do day to day.

Conclusion

I have only have one conclusion from these points: It’s a long game.

Real nonviolence is another level of consciousness. It requires seeing ourselves differently and seeing each other differently. It’s not fast, it’s not easy, and it requires investment at every level over long periods of time.

So there’s two options: Give up or Dig in.

We know what Giving Up feels like.

(“You have been down there Neo… you know that road”)

So we’ve got to Dig In.

(quotes)