Future of Conflict #16: Healing Resistance (Part II)

There is so much that is so close to my heart in Healing Resistance that I’m taking my time with it. This week I went over Part II, which is Kazu’s rendition of the Six Principles of Nonviolence, as handed down to him from his mentors and trainers in the tradition of Kingian Nonviolence.

Kazu sees this tradition of Nonviolence as:

An exploration of the impact of violence and compassion on the human experience and an attempt to understand the laws that govern them.

In reading his book, I see it as a way of life, a set of ways of looking at the world and acting in the world. I believe it’s the way we would all act if we remembered the unity of life.

Here’s Kazu’s overview of the Six Principles of Nonviolence:

Nonviolence is a way of life for courageous people.

The Beloved Community is the framework for the future.

Attack forces of evil, not persons doing evil.

Accept suffering for the sake of the cause to achieve the goal.

Avoid internal violence of the spirit as well as external physical violence.

The universe is on the side of justice.

And here’s how I remember/translate them:

Consistency
Unity
Malleability
Counterintuitive
Depth
Faith

In today’s episode, I’ll go over each of those six principles.

1: Nonviolence is a way of life for courageous people. (Consistency)

With the first principle, Kingian Nonviolence firmly plants a flag on the side of a principled approach to nonviolence, as opposed to a simply tactical commitment. It is not just an effective strategy for political change—it is a moral imperative for social transformation.

The foundational idea here is that nonviolence is a way of life. If we were to use it tactically, we could turn it “on” and “off” to achieve a goal. And I do think there are certain benefits that accrue to doing that. But the real benefits come from long term practice such that the nonviolence becomes a deep habit, a part of our very nature.

We commit to practicing nonviolence in every interaction, in every moment, as best we can, because our goal is so much broader than passing a new law or winning a political campaign. Our goal is to repair harm, reconcile relationships, and move ever so slightly closer to Beloved Community.

Gandhi and King were focused on the words “courage” and “bravery” because at the time (and maybe now?), non-violence was associated with passivity and cowardice.

Either you were manly enough to fight, or you backed off.

This is that whole hyphen confusion from last week: non-violence vs. nonviolence.

The point of nonviolence is not to avoid danger, but to respond to danger in a more skillful way that will be:

more effective at problem-solving
better for you
better for your opponents

Note that because of the “better for your opponents” bit, revenge and spite are immediately incompatible with nonviolence.

Principle 1: Nonviolence is Consistency.

2: The Beloved Community is the framework for the future. (Unity)

Depending on your state of mind, this is either the most obvious or the most difficult concepts to grasp:

The idea that there is no one outside of Beloved Community. No one. Not the person who dresses differently than us, not the person who has hurt us the most, not the person who believes in a different God, or the person with different political beliefs.

It’s like the ancient definition of God (Brahman) as “The One without a Second”.

If we were to draw a circle or make a mathematical set of everyone who is part of the Beloved Community, there could be no one outside of it, by definition.

This is the one critique I have of Bernie and other political rhetoric that needs a scapegoat. As long as there is a THEY who are the problem, we’re actually training ourselves in a false Us and Them dichotomy that will end up biting us in the ass.

Beloved Community includes the privileged and the marginalized, the oppressor and the oppressed—the prisoner and the prison guard, the rich and the poor… In order for us to begin moving toward that world, we need to stop attacking any people as if they are the problem.

The obvious problem is: “What about all the fucked up shit in the world? Do we even get to address that?”

Yes. Yes, we do. Next.

Principle 2: Nonviolence is Unity.

3: Attack forces of evil, not persons doing evil. (Malleability)

In nonviolence the way to address evil is to address the actions themselves without focusing unnecessarily on the actor. This is how Gandhi remained so nice and cordial to his opponents — he didn’t waste time criticizing them but focused instead on stopping what they were doing or supporting.

One way of justifying this is the dying Jesus line:

Forgive them father, they know not what they do

Which is probably true, most of the time, for most of us. But Kazu takes a very different approach to reach the same conclusion:

I have a theory: when we understand people’s stories, then all of their actions—including the ways in which they hurt others—begin to make sense. This doesn’t justify their behavior; it doesn’t condone their actions. But when we can see why they did what they did, we can begin to empathize. I have heard countless stories from countless people—many of whom have committed gross acts of violence—and so far, this theory has held up 100 percent of the time.

I’ve written about this kind of thing before: it’s better to understand how it makes sense for That Guy to believe That Thing than to try to convince him he’s wrong. Because you might have to convince him his entire life was wrong, and he should have lived your life, in order to get him to change his mind.

Unlikely.

Because of Kazu’s history in social justice movements, significant chunks of the book are aimed at social justice organizers. Some sections are meant to inspire and others are meant to challenge.

I like this story because it challenges the zero-sum notions about empathy that we inherit in our polarized political environment:

Take the case of Eric Casebolt, an officer in McKinney, Texas.

In 2015, residents of an upper-middle-class neighborhood in McKinney called the police to complain about a pool party involving dozens of teenagers, many of them Black. When Casebolt showed up on the scene, all hell broke loose as he started yelling obscenities at the teens and ordering them around while pointing his baton at them. At one point, Casebolt grabbed a fifteen-year-old girl by her braids and threw her down on the ground and pulled out his gun and aimed it at another group of teenagers.

While nothing justifies his actions, when you understand more of the backstory, it begins to make sense. The pool party was the third call that Casebolt received that day. His first call was to the scene of a suicide, where he had to console the widow of a man who had just killed himself by shooting himself in his head in front of his own children.

Right after having to take photographs of the man’s body, Casebolt was called to another incident where he had to talk a girl down from killing herself in front of her family by jumping off a ledge.

Those two incidents took an emotional toll, as they should. No one would want our police officers to be so disconnected from human emotion that witnessing such tragedies would have no impact on them.

However, instead of being given counseling or time to take care of himself, Casebolt went right on to his next call of the day.

Who is really at fault here? Officer Casebolt, for letting his humanity get the best of him, or the institution of policing, which didn’t care enough about Casebolt’s mental health to even give him the rest of the day off? Do we blame Casebolt for acting outrageously after witnessing two tragedies, or do we blame the system of policing that instructs employees to “suck it up” and move on to the next case?

One of the main benefits you have by not judging people is that you can assist them if they have a desire to change.

I believe that the process toward true accountability can only begin when the person who caused the harm can understand what brought them to the point in their lives where they did what they did and understand, own, and feel genuine remorse for the impact that their actions had on everyone that they touched. That remorse and ownership is a prerequisite for genuine accountability.

If I hurt somebody, then I lose a part of my humanity in that process. In order for me to heal that wound in myself, I need to understand the impact of my actions and feel the remorse. That remorse, as painful as it might be to feel, is like medicine—a necessary component in my own healing. Creating space for me to understand that is an act of loving accountability. It reminds me of the law of interdependence—that I cannot harm another without it somehow affecting me.

If we are attacking the person who caused the harm, it usually puts them on the defensive and actually does the opposite of what I just described. If we are busy accusing the person who caused the harm of being evil, of being monsters, of being criminals and murderers, there is a natural tendency for that person to build up a wall and defend themselves from those attacks. And in doing that, they are moving farther away from sitting with the harm that they caused and feeling remorse.

Here’s the cheat-sheet version:

When people talk about “holding someone accountable,” the key word should not be accountable, but holding.

This goes back to the fundamental context of conflict: Relationship. The holding strengthens the relationship and allows the person the safety and autonomy to evolve.

I remember this as malleability because we are not fixing a notion of who someone IS by a shitty action (or series of actions) they took. We give them room to change even as we protect people from their shittiness (through Principle 4).

Principle 3: Nonviolence is Malleability.

4: Accept suffering for the sake of the cause to achieve the goal. (Counterintuitive)

This is probably the hardest of Gandhi’s notions for me to grasp, because it requires a real confrontation with death. What Gandhi and King came to is that doing The Right Thing made their lives more valuable than doing The Safe Thing.

This is counter to all of our highly-evolved survival instincts and has to be trained out of us in a (probably) similar way that armies have trained soldiers to go towards battle and not away from it (which would be the reasonable thing to do).

Of course, there are many ways to approach the spectre of death. You could do it with a bomb strapped to your body or with a machine gun in each hand (there’s gotta be a movie like that), or you could do it calmly and patiently, singing songs.

This principle is about choosing to accept the risk that comes with putting ourselves in danger. If we stand up to oppression, chances are, we will have to suffer along the way. Accepting suffering at the onset gives us a different relation to those inevitable struggles and challenges. It gives us choices about how we experience the inevitable.

Which option you choose has (at least) two consequences:

The first is a consequence for you (the actor). I don’t have any direct experience with this, but according to Kazu — who has worked with hundreds of prisoners and policemen who killed other people — violence changes a person. There is a moral self-injury that we might want to avoid.

Secondly, violence is only effective in limited conditions. Generally, you need to have the Most of It. In social or political movements by an oppressed minority, victory usually comes when part of the majority turn from tacitly supporting the oppression (the normal, easy thing to do) to actively denouncing it.

Nonviolence is often a better strategy, both personally (moral injury) and politically (bad press).

Kazu shares:

From the fall of 2011 to late spring of 2012, the Occupy movement was my whole life; it was all I did, all I thought about. I was in Occupy-related meetings almost every night. I was part of almost every major mobilization during Occupy Oakland. I saw its rise and fall and watched its swells and declines in momentum.

From what I witnessed, every time there was property destruction, every time the media had an opportunity to paint the movement as violent, the number of people who participated in our next mobilization decreased. Every. Single. Time.

I have seen this dynamic play out multiple times throughout the course of several movements. When nonviolent activists are attacked and are able to accept that suffering, the movement grows. When people use violent tactics to fight back, the movement shrinks.

There’s nothing fun or pretty about this.

This is why Gandhi and King and all of their associates spent so much time training for their actions. And then spent so much time in jail. It’s a strategy that risks so much. Think of the effect on their kids! Why would you sacrifice your families peace and happiness? Counterintuitive! There has to be a damn good goal and a damn good strategy.

Principle 3: Nonviolence is Counterintuitive.

5: Avoid internal violence of the spirit as well as external physical violence. (Depth)

There are two kinds of internal violence we’re prone to: hating ourselves and hating others. Both are a lot deeper than physical harm. We can imagine physical harm like the mushroom that is the product of so much unseen mycelium.

Hating ourselves looks like this:

“Internalized oppression” is when messages from oppressive systems and worldviews about our inferiority take root inside our own minds until we start believing in our inferiority. I’m never gonna be anything more than a criminal and a thug. Internal violence.

In addition to harmful beliefs, internal violence also manifests as negative self-talk.

“I’m not good enough.”

“I’m not pretty enough.”

“I’m always going to be alone.”

“I’m never going to be successful.”

It manifests as emotions like despair and hopelessness.

“Things are never going to get better.”

“The world is only getting worse.”

“We will never be able to create change.”

These things are usually rooted in unhealed trauma. So the work of nonviolence isn’t only about combating the violence “out there.” It is equally about doing the work of healing “in here,” so that we can release the spirit of violence that we have embodied in our own hearts.

Great, now I gotta sign up for therapy! But yeah, basically, this requires daily personal work. Because everything in there is going to affect how I relate to myself and everybody else.

The other side, hating others, is maybe more obvious:

Hating someone is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.

In a future episode, I’ll go deep into Ken Cloke’s forgiveness technique. But the basic idea is that the only person’s experience our negative feelings affect is our own. And constantly, at that.

The point here goes back to the hyphen thing. Non-violence is not hitting someone. Nonviolence is understanding your experience of self enough to be aware of all the subtle violent programs we might running, at any time, towards any target (including ourselves).

Principle 5: Nonviolence is Depth.

6: The universe is on the side of justice. (Faith)

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.

(from Theodore Parker, a nineteenth-century abolitionist and Unitarian minister)

I have so much envy about this one. The writings of Gandhi and King are saturated with references to how sure they were that the Divine element was ever-present and on their side. They seemed to have a literal, visceral, concrete, feeling about that.

The best I can do is an intellectual circuit I call “Spiritual Pragmatism”, where I look at how I want to behave (Nonviolently) and look at what I need to believe in order to behave that way (Faith It Will All Work Out), then believe that thing because I want to act that way. (more on Spiritual Pragmatism here)

What I like about Kazu’s explanation of this one is that it relies heavily on you and me getting busy:

Dr. King wrote, “Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of [people] willing to be coworkers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation.”

There is a dialectical synthesis between faith and action. We are motivated to keep acting because of the faith. And it is the action that leads (eventually) to the results that inspire faith. Perhaps in ourselves, or perhaps in others. (Like the Iris Dement song)

I want to end with a rather weird extended quote by Kazu on the subject of faith and justice.

I sit back and watch the investments that our society makes into systems of violence. We invest in war, broken school systems, a broken prison system, guns, violent media, economic policies that perpetuate poverty, fossil fuels—a culture that isolates us and moves us further away from our true selves. We invest in all of these systems of violence, and when the universe gives us the return on those investments, and we see violence in our communities, we act like something is wrong with the universe.

Every time a young person is killed in the streets that is evidence that the universe is just. Every time a new war breaks out, there is another school shooting, a new species goes extinct, a hate crime is perpetrated, or there is another case of police violence, I see evidence that the universe is, indeed, just.

Violence doesn’t just appear out of nowhere. Everything we live with is nothing but a series of causes and conditions. Everything in this world exists because of something that came before it that gave rise to it. That is the history of conflict. As long as we invest in systems of violence, it is just that we get violent returns. That is the balance and order of the universe doing its thing.

What will happen when we invest in systems of peace? When we invest in our communities and invest in right relationships with each other and the earth? I believe the same balance and order of the universe will begin to give us those returns instead.

For Kazu, justice does not mean always mean hunky-dory. It means, Trent Reznor style, we’re going to get what we deserve. There’s some dark sinner stuff in there I’m not totally comfortable with, but the logic is good.

Princple 6: Nonviolence is Faith.

Conclusion

I’ve been a student of Gandhi since 1999 and reading deeply on conflict resolution for the last 2 years. But something about this book has made it clear to me that Nonviolence is what you get when you apply conflict resolution to real life. It’s the umbrella, or the container. There is just a gold mine of practical wisdom in this body of literature and I will continue to mine it for us.