Noted William James biographer Robert D. Richardson has a short post over at The Second Pass (where they’re doing a William James week in celebration of the centenary of his death) about James’ attempts to grapple with the problem of war. His most well-known confrontation with the matter is of course in the essay “The Moral Equivalent of War,” but Richardson also points to another, earlier effort by James to propose an alternative to warmaking, one profoundly reminiscent of Gandhi:

James made two concrete proposals for how this might be done. In The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), he reached back to Thoreau’s Walden and the idea, discussed in the first chapter of that classic, of voluntary poverty. (When Americans see that phrase, they see “poverty” written in boldface. We must train ourselves to see “voluntary,” meaning willed, written in caps and printed in red.)

“What we now need to discover in the social realm is the moral equivalent of war,” James wrote in Varieties, “something heroic that will speak to men as universally as war does, and yet will be as compatible with their spiritual selves as war has proved itself to be incompatible. . . . May not voluntarily accepted poverty be ‘the strenuous life’ without the need of crushing weaker peoples?”

By the time he wrote “The Moral Equivalent of War,” James had dropped the idea of voluntary poverty or simplicity—the sort of thing advocated in Walden, and by Wendell Berry, and by the modern “freegans”—in favor of something very close to the modern idea of the Peace Corps. “To coal and iron mines, to freight trains, to fishing fleets in December, to dish-washing, clothes-washing, and window-washing, to road building and tunnel making, to foundries and stoke holes, and to the frames of skyscrapers, would our gilded youth be drafted off, according to their choice, to get the childishness knocked out of them, and to come back into society with healthier sympathies and soberer ideas.”

One need look no further for resonance with James’ first proposal than Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj, as he describes the requirement for Satyagraha, or non-violent resistance. While his life was one of very much the voluntary poverty James proposes, Gandhi emphasized spiritual renunciation more than material:

Just as there is necessity for chastity, so is there for poverty. Pecuniary ambition and passive resistance cannot well go together. Those who have money are not expected to throw it away, but they are expected to be indifferent about it. They must be prepared to lose every penny rather than give up passive resistance.

He added elsewhere, on the significance of suffering in the struggle for justice:

He who has not the capacity of suffering cannot non-co-operate. He who has not learnt to sacrifice his property and even his family when necessary can never non-co-operate. … There lies the test of love, patience, and strength.

Both Gandhi and James recognized that the world without war would not be a world without hardship or suffering—nor would we want it to be.

In Micah White’s recent article about so-called “clicktivism,” he points out that the substance of activism has been replaced by reformist platitudes and marketing. There is a difference, however, between an educational campaign and straight marketing. While many people certainly work on both worlds simultaneously, there is often a tangible difference in the look, feel and substance of work done for a cause. At best, it seeks to stimulate debate and discussion amongst sympathetic parties, while looking to sustain itself without having to rely on government subsidies. The article was written in a European paper (of which I am a fan), so I can understand how this last point could be lost given that many organizations in Europe are subsidized by government grants, as opposed to the United States where contributions from concerned individuals are the only way for organizations to survive.

The promotion of ideas is something that societies need more of, not less, and figuring out sustainable models in tough economic times is crucial. I hope that marketers of “good” ideas continue to push them and get people to verify that they are indeed that good. For that, there needs to be increased transparency to see where the money is going and what is being done under the banner of idealism.

If the earthquake in Haiti leads to the election of a musician as president, one whose organization was found to have embezzled money before the donations in January started rolling in, then of course it’s nerve-racking to see all the groups that funneled money into Yéle Haiti, aggregated from clicks and text messages. But the most powerful story to me of digital activism in Haiti remains the Ushahidi deployment, where people trapped under the rubble could text message a number, have their position appear on a public map, and lead to someone saving their life. A system like this requires a lot of moving parts. For a message in Haiti in Creole to be translated, mapped and sent to response teams on the ground there, volunteers from around the world had come together to chip in. This had only become possible recently.

The true power of digital tools is to engender digital resistance. Whether resisting the devastation of your community, accessing information despite limits on freedom of expression, or being able to mobilize people around an injustice in seconds, technology is a creative tool that can be used. There might be many more marketers trained, but that doesn’t mean that these tools can’t be more creative, nor that they’re working against us.

This short video, called Civil Resistance: A First Look, which I first saw at the Fletcher Summer Institute at Tufts in June, is a solid introduction to the concept of civil resistance for anyone unfamiliar with it. The narrator answers a series of basic questions that many people new to the idea might have and briefly goes into some of the strategic and tactical concerns that activists face in developing a movement.

For example, there is a good explanation of the risks involved in public action against repressive regimes and the pros and cons of having a charismatic leader.

My only major issue with the film is with the response to the question, “What if my adversary can’t be persuaded?” The narrator replies definitively that civil resistance is not about persuasion, and that it is not an effort to reach the conscience of the opponents, but to remove their power by using ridicule and humor, imposing economic costs and disrupting business as usual.

While those are all important ways to affect the balance of power, to argue that persuasion is not part of the equation is misleading. It has in fact been a feature of most nonviolent movements. Reaching out to the conscience of the opponent was central to the struggles that Gandhi and Martin Luther King led, and to their understanding of how nonviolence works.

Being able to convert your adversaries – while perhaps rare, especially for those with the most at stake in preserving the status quo – can be a deciding factor in the outcome of the struggle. I would argue, for example, that persuasion of the opponent is an instrumental part of any nonviolent success story where defections by the police or security forces play a central role in the overthrow of a repressive regime. This was the case with the movements that brought down Marcos in the Philippines, the Shah in Iran and Milosevic in Serbia, to name just a few.

The film can be downloaded in several different languages on its accompanying website, which also has a good collection of other resources on the subject.

The character attacks, verbal harassment and forced resignation of USDA official Shirley Sherrod last month is one more example of the ugliness and insidiousness of gotcha journalism and craven political hypocrisy and expediency. By now, it is likely you are familiar with this tragic story of deception and betrayal. While apologies have been doled out like candy since the day Sherrod was fired, the American people have been left without answers to the questions of how and why the events of this injustice unfolded as they did.

On July 19, with the intention of advancing an agenda of hate, fear, intimidation and denigration, far-right zealot and propagandist Andrew Breitbart and his corporate collaborator Fox News Channel (FNC), two notorious smear artists and purveyors of disinformation, invented a story about racial discrimination and dressed it up as factual news. In doing so they successfully duped media organizations, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and top officials in the Obama administration. Breitbart and FNC, both of whom market themselves as paragons of truth, have a history of direct and malicious trickery. You will recall that in 2009 they convinced political leaders that White House green jobs czar Van Jones and the federally funded community-based organization ACORN were engaged in scandalous activities. The fabricated stories led to the firing of Jones and defunding of ACORN.

Shirley Sherrod is the latest victim of Breitbart and FNC and their right-wing propaganda machine. What they generated this time was a selectively excerpted, decontextualized and misleading video of a speech Sherrod gave at a NAACP function last March, effectively vilifying and railroading Sherrod with the charge that the video was not only incontrovertible evidence of reverse racism, but according to Breitbart it was “video proof” that “the NAACP awards racism”, and according to a FNC headline, it was “government discrimination caught on tape.” Seemingly, the targets of Breitbart and FNC were the NAACP and President Obama, not necessarily Sherrod. However, to incriminate and discredit the NAACP and Obama, they used Sherrod as a tool of convenience and as a means to end, utterly without conscience or a sense of responsibility.

In the manipulated video, Shirley Sherrod, daughter of Hosie Miller, a victim of racial murder by a white neighbor in the Jim Crow South, and wife of Charles Sherrod, a 1960s Freedom Rider and leading member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), is seen and heard recounting a time twenty-four years earlier when as an employee of a nonprofit land assistance agency she was initially disinclined to afford the “full force” of her job capacity to help a white farmer to save the family farm. The reason Sherrod cited for her pause and reluctance was the discrimination against black farmers she had witnessed during the span of her lifetime and career. In fact, the full anecdote shared by Sherrod that day revealed very clearly that she overcame any thoughts about permitting race to play a part in her decision making about human need. Instead, she summoned the courage and strength to confront her initial thoughts and feelings and, as a result, discovered her capacity for empathy and was guided by an unadulterated appreciation, respect and value for the impoverished, regardless of race.
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On Sunday, the Toronto Star ran an interesting review of Philip Carr-Gomm’s new book, A Brief History of Nakedness, in which he offers “a sustained mediation on the spiritual, cultural and political implications of being naked in public.” The book includes numerous photos, including this image of 50 women posing nude as part of Baring Witness, a group in West Marin County, California, that used nudity to protest the impending Iraq war in November 2002.

As Carr-Gomm argues, “Nakedness makes a human being particularly vulnerable but in certain circumstances strangely powerful, which is why it has become so popular as a vehicle for political protest.” According to Carr-Gomm, by disrobing, protestors demonstrate that they are both fearless and have nothing to hide.At least, that’s the ideal situation. Sometimes the political intentions of being in the buff can get lost, as happened during the recent expressions of G20 activism. “There’s a naked guy at Queen and Peter,” @one_more_night tweeted. “I think he’s protesting clothes.”

Contrary to what you might first think, it is not only hippie types that have used their naked bodies to protest. Carr-Gomm tells the story of one religious group that employed this tactic:

A radical sect of Ukrainian Christians, the Doukhobors (which translates into “spirit wrestlers”) were considered heretics by the Orthodox Church and generally irritated the Russian government. So in 1899 the Doukhobors were encouraged to move their troublemaking to Canada, where they were promised 65 hectares of free land, a bracing climate, equitable laws, peace and prosperity. More than a third of the population (nearly 8,000) said yes, but by 1903 they were unhappy, and an extremist faction called the Sons of Freedom emerged, inspired by the Quakers and Leo Tolstoy. As Carr-Gomm notes, the Sons of Freedom “decided to mount a sustained campaign of protest against the government, whom they believed had reneged on their promises regarding land rights and were enforcing compulsory education in government schools.”

In May of 1903 over 45 Doukhobors protested by marching naked, were charged with “nudism” and sentenced to jail. Naked skirmishes between the Canadian government and the Doukhobors continued into the 1970s.

As I have argued on this site before, I still question the efficacy of nude protests. While taking off your clothes definitely can draw a crowd and the attention of the media, the focus generally seems to be on the fact that the protesters are naked rather than the issue they are campaigning around. And as a rule of thumb, activists want to avoid tactics that deflect attention from the cause they are fighting for.

Over at News Junkie Post, Mike Kaulbars uses a Sun Tzu quote – “Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat” – to frame his thoughtful critique of the Black Bloc, which is worth quoting at length:

While it is true that there is a certain amount of “hey look at me” frat boy element to the Bloc’s actions, it is a mistake to dismiss them as simply kids out for a riot. Many of them are as committed to the issues as anyone else in the movement. They are usually able to articulate at least [the] basics of Insurrectionary anarchism, and as Martha noted “their vandalism is clearly focused on the links between everyday economic violence and institutions,” ie it is not random libertinage. They are angry and violent, but they are not simply rioting.

However, having a cause and a politic is not the same as having a strategy.

The intellectual underpinnings of Insurrectionary anarchism are over a century old and framed within an entirely different social and political context. The modern defences of the methods (ie tactics) that the Bloc uses such as Ward Churchill’s ‘Pacifism as Pathology‘ and Gelderloos’ ‘How Nonviolence Protects the State‘ are laughable. They are intellectual pablum written for the naive believer to confirm their simplistic caricatures of nonviolent struggle. That anyone takes them seriously should be a mystery, but there is a reason that they do.

The basic pro-violence arguments as they articulated by the Bloc and supporters are summarized here. These may seem like parodies if you have never heard them, but they’re not. The entire case for violence rests on a cartoonish misrepresentation of what nonviolent struggle is and how it works. The alleged arguments are easily refuted (eg here) , so why are they so rarely challenged and exposed for the nonsense that they are?

In part because of the repressive tactics of the Bloc. Anyone who has attempted to have a rational discussion about tactics when Bloc sympathizers are present is aware that they practice silencing any dissent with a variety of tricks, from ad hominem attacks to accusations of not being in solidarity, etc. The faux anarchists really are a case study in the ‘Tyranny of Structurelessness.”

In part due to effective marketing. The phrase “Diversity of Tactics” (DoT) is inspired as an euphemism for violence (it puts “collateral damage” to shame) and allows the use of yet another logical fallacy to be used to prevent intelligent dialogue. Blocists will not allow any discussion of violence, you have to say “Diversity of Tactics.” In that way they try and force the false choice between accepting violence or being against diversity. It’s middle school debating tactics and logically incoherent, but it works to silence debate.

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The last month has seen 6 Australian soldiers killed in Afghanistan, bringing our country’s total to seventeen. Yet even with a federal election looming and 61% of Australians wanting troops brought home our involvement in the war has bipartisan support. In fact, far from raising questions over our mission there, these deaths seem to only strengthen the government’s resolve to remain. The same seems to be true of the U.S. and many other NATO countries.  It strengthens their resolve not because it makes the mission there any more necessary, or more strategically important, but because of a principle called “the sacrifice trap.”

This psychological principle works through an escalating commitment to a failing course of action, ironically in order to justify that course of action.  The more one sacrifices in pursuit of a particular objective, the more difficult it is to change course from that objective, and the more stridently it will be defended.  Often we experience this when they are put on hold by a telephone company. Our dogged commitment to the call seems to grow the longer they make us wait.  This is not because we don’t want to hang up, but because we feel the time spent will have been a waste if we do.

The more soldiers who are killed in the course of this war, the more committed some governments seem to be to it.  It is partly a matter of saving face – no one likes to admit they have made a mistake, let alone governments or countries.  But greater than that is the sense of investment, which must be seen to bear fruit, even in the most fruitless course of action.  Furthermore, the greater the “investment,” the more the prize seems to be inflated in importance.

During the Talisman Sabre joint US/Australian military exercises in 2009, my friends and I had many conversations with soldiers from Australia and the U.S., many of whom had spent time in combat roles in Iraq and Afghanistan. To my surprise, almost without exception, they expressed the futility of the task there.  Some had lost good friends. But they were under orders, they said, and their families relied on the income they generated from the army.

It is believed that as many as 25 percent of US soldiers are looking for a way out of the military, yet don’t feel able to leave.  Having committed their lives to the military – and in many cases, committed acts they regret – the stakes have been raised to unacceptable levels to admit that they have been wrong.

The only way out of the sacrifice trap is to give those involved – soldiers, the military hierarchy, and government – a way out that enables them retain their dignity and reduces the cognitive dissonance between knowing their actions are wrong or counter-productive and doing it anyway.  Ironically, the more stridently the left pillories their actions, the less likely it becomes that it will change course, because it forces them deeper into the jaws of the sacrifice trap.

I wonder then whether the latest Wikileaks scandal might actually backfire on the voices for ending the war. If it leads to demonization and harshness, it almost certainly will.

Of course, toning down the criticism of the war does not mean that people should not be held accountable for immoral actions, but demonizing them will only hinder the process of necessary change.

There seems to be a delicate balance in this between personal pride and personal cost. Several countries have of course already backed out of their involvement in the war, but they have been countries with relatively little invested in terms of personal pride. Nations seem to have seen their way clear to withdraw when the cost outweighed the pride element.

If a rigorous cost-benefit analysis were to be undertaken – including accounting for the reality of property destruction, injury, and loss of life on all sides – I am certain it would reveal that the war in Afghanistan is really in no one’s national interest, and that there are numerous other, less costly options to achieve the stated objectives.  But until such advice is heeded, further commitment to this “war without end” will continue to be a disservice to us all – especially to those soldiers putting themselves at risk at the behest of their government.

One of the most difficult challenges posed to the antiwar movement in the 20th century was that of the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. Once the head of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, he drifted away from nonviolence on the eve of World War II, insisting that in a fallen world like ours, violence would sometimes be necessary.

Today The Immanent Frame published my interview with sociologist Mark Juergensmeyer, author of, among other books, Terror in the Mind of God and Gandhi’s Way: A Handbook of Conflict Resolution. He has written extensively about Gandhian nonviolence, but he was also a student of Niebuhr’s at Union Theological Seminary, so he has some unique insights about the legacies of the two men. The interview covers a lot of other ground (including reflections on Juergensmeyer’s own interviews with terrorists), but here are the relevant passages:

NS: How does your early work on Gandhi and nonviolence affect your analysis of religious violence?

MJ: In several ways. It helps explain why I became interested in violence in the first place. Pacifists like myself are often fascinated with social violence because it seems so odd. What is there in the human imagination that allows us to switch gears so easily between the normalcy of civil society and the overdrive of warfare? I wanted to understand what happens in people’s minds when they’re so seized with passion about a struggle that they’ll go out and kill in such horrible ways.

What I’ve learned most from my understanding of the Gandhian mode of conflict resolution is the importance of trying to understand another’s perspective. For Gandhi, this was the fun of conflict—and I do mean fun, because Gandhi loved conflict. He was a pacifist, but that doesn’t mean he was passive. Conflict, as Gandhi pointed out, is one time when you’re forced to see the world from another person’s point of view. Unless somebody challenges you forcefully, in a way that makes you stop and think, you’ll just go idly about your business. We all know that from our own relationships; it’s not until somebody comes at you from a different point of view, seemingly from left field, that you really begin to question yourself and look carefully at what you’re doing.

I began my work on religion, politics, and violence by trying to understand worldviews that clash with ours—and by that I mean not only theirs but ours as well. I did so with the awareness that my way of seeing the world is not necessarily the only way. It was, in a sense, a Gandhian project.

NS: And you also studied with Reinhold Niebuhr at Union?

MJ: Niebuhr was probably my greatest single influence as a professor. I was literally his last student. My first year at Union was the last year he taught a seminar, and I was in it. The second year, there was a group of us who met in his apartment every Friday afternoon. Then, the third year, the other two had left Union, and I went up there on my own. One of the things that drew me to Niebuhr—though it was his ideas that drew me more than anything else—was that his family and my family came from the same German immigrant community in central Missouri.

NS: He was someone who began as a pacifist but went on to develop a critique of pacifism. How did Niebuhr’s thought play into how you think about violence?

MJ: Well, I disagree with Niebuhr on his analysis of Gandhi. I think he didn’t understand Gandhi. He regarded Gandhi as a sentimentalist, the same way he regarded Marx as a sentimentalist: as someone with vaunted expectations about human nature. But Gandhi was more of a realist than Niebuhr assumed, and his method of conflict resolution involves exerting a certain kind of pressure. This is not exactly the coercion Niebuhr accused him of, because Gandhi tried to make a distinction between coercive and non-coercive force. Force that is coercive doesn’t give you any choice about accepting or not accepting your opponent’s position. Non-coercive force is about making you dramatically aware of a situation while leaving you to make a choice on your own. Gandhi would want concessions to be made out of free will rather than by coercion. Actually, I don’t think that Niebuhr was as different from Gandhi as he thought.

As part of a series of articles on activism in the US, the Utne Reader has published a short interview with Gene Sharp in their current issue that is worth checking out. Here’s an excerpt:

When you look at contemporary domestic movements, both on the left and on the right, what do you see?

People don’t have a good idea of what kind of social change they want. They assume that you get major social change simply by voting every four years.

When I lived in Brooklyn many years ago the people in my neighborhood would always find something to complain about and then end with the same phrase: “What are you going to do?” That’s a tragic situation.

Is there a single mistake you see over and over again?

Yes. The failure to properly analyze political power; nobody understands political power. All power has its sources. And if you can identify the sources you can cut them off.

It’s a fundamental distinction that leads to a totally different approach to waging political struggle.

What do these sources of power look like?

There is moral authority: Do the people giving the orders have the right to give them? There is economic power. There is control of the masses. Hitler didn’t have three brains, you know; he got other people convinced that what he was doing was important and that they should help.

Rather than protest the actions of those with political power, you can cut off the sources of their power—and this is rarely understood.

This seems like an approach that demands strategy.

Well, it should, but not everybody who uses nonviolent action knows a thing about strategy. People often think that if they can just show the world how terrible an opponent is, they’ll be able to get rid of the opponent. That’s nonsense.

And the opposite of identifying the sources of power.

That’s a totally different trip. There’s also a big issue [in nonviolent movements] of how people define success and failure. I remember cases where people didn’t succeed at all in achieving their objectives but say they felt better afterward. That’s not success. It’s important to feel that you’ve done something worthwhile, but it isn’t good enough.

You have to learn as much about nonviolent struggle as possible; know your own situation as well as possible; and know your opponent’s objectives, needs, and weaknesses as well as possible—and then make a plan.

You shouldn’t have an objective like total justice or complete peace. You have to think in smaller bites. Work out a plan that will weaken your opponent, but also strengthen your people and give them the capacity to carry on the struggle—to achieve the next objective.

So if you haven’t defined a realistic objective before you’ve launched into a struggle using nonviolent methods, you’ve already failed.

Yes.

Nonviolent actions were a major component of the movement to stop the invasion of Iraq. Activists failed to stop the war; does that mean the movement was a failure?

You don’t get rid of war by professing against it—though professing against it should be done. You can’t get rid of war until you have a substitute tactic. And once war is breaking out, it’s usually too late to apply a substitute means.

With Iraq, there needed to be an effective nonviolent movement to oust Saddam Hussein. There wasn’t a need for a war in Poland [when the country broke away from Soviet control], for example; they didn’t need a foreign military power to intervene because they did it themselves and they did it nonviolently.

Since the recent passage of Arizona Senate Bill 1070, scheduled to go into effect on July 29, those of us working for social justice in the United States have a rare opportunity to register a particularly effective form of protest.  The inherently unjust nature of this legislation presents conscientious individuals with a real chance to go back to what many might say civil disobedience was originally intended to do: promote the repeal of an unjust law by openly and nonviolently breaking the law itself.

This is what has come to be known today as direct civil disobedience.  It is distinguished from indirect civil disobedience, where the law being broken is not itself the target of the protest.  Not many would argue, for instance, that a law prohibiting people from sitting in the middle of the street is unjust.  When used to draw attention to an issue of social importance, however, violating this law with a willingness to accept the consequences may be an effective tool.  Although the merit of such tactics can vary depending on any number of factors, to score a direct protest by violating an unjust law is very likely to be viewed as more legitimate.

The distinction is useful because in recent years we in the United States haven’t had to worry much about severely repressive, overtly dictatorial laws.  Not so very long ago, in certain parts of the country, violating an unjust law was as simple as ordering food at a lunch counter, sitting near the front on a city bus, or going swimming at a public beach.  More common in the US today we find people courting arrest by blocking entrances to buildings, occupying government offices, or chaining themselves to fences, seeking to address an injustice more or less unrelated to the law actually being transgressed.  Since these injustices don’t always allow for direct, public defiance, we try to create that tenuous link between issue and protest method as best we can.  But while indirect civil disobedience always beats inaction, from a strategic standpoint, if the opportunity is there, direct beats indirect every time.  And with this new Arizona law, the opportunity is definitely there.

Indeed, not since the end of the draft in 1973 has there been a law in the United States that seems to render itself so well to direct civil disobedience.  Arizona SB 1070 requires non-citizens to keep registration documents on them at all times, and forces police officers to inquire about immigration status during any kind of arrest or routine stop if they encounter “reasonable suspicion” that the person might be in the country illegally.  In addition, the new law gives police leeway to arrest someone solely on the basis of there being probable cause that they may be undocumented, at which point they’re to be turned over directly to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

This basically boils down to the police in Arizona having new license to stop anyone looking remotely Hispanic – for no other reason than that they look remotely Hispanic – demand papers from them, and take them into custody if satisfactory documents are not immediately produced.  Predictably this has led some people, such as Roman Catholic Archbishop Roger Mahony, to draw parallels to the lives of those in Europe forced to live under the Nazi régime.  Additionally – and this concerns all of us – the new Arizona law makes it a crime to “transport or move”, or “conceal, harbor or shield” undocumented immigrants, reminding me more of something out of the Fugitive Slave Acts from this country’s dark past.  Against such blatantly unjust, potentially far-reaching legislation, at least we’re armed with a chance for everyone to participate in its direct disobedience, instead of just abandoning our undocumented brothers and sisters to their fate.

In a relatively short amount of time, Martin Luther King, Jr. became somewhat of an expert on unjust laws.  In a speech he delivered before the Fellowship of the Concerned in 1961, King defined an unjust law as “a code that the majority inflicts upon the minority, which that minority had no part in enacting or creating, because that minority had no right to vote in many instances.”  Although close to 50 years old, this definition holds up in modern-day Arizona quite well.  The undocumented minority, having virtually no recourse to its voice being heard, is at the mercy of the majority – in this case that of the Arizona Senate – 60 percent Republican, and 100 percent white.

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Over the course of his career primatologist and popularizer Frans de Waal has had a sustained interest in the relationship between human nature and violence. Circumstances in the study of our primate relatives has forced the issue: in the 1970s chimpanzees, which were previously thought to live in Edenic tranquility, were observed conducting raids and even killing one another. Meanwhile, their close relatives, the bonobos, entered the popular imagination as the hope for more utopian future: their females are empowered, and they resolve conflicts in tender orgies. Over at 3QuarksDaily, de Waal summarizes the debate about apes and human violence and thinks about how to apply it to violent conflict in the modern world. His essay is accompanied by a short video produced by the impressive Department of Expansion:

Here’s de Waal:

In recent history, we have seen so much war-related death that we imagine that it must always have been like this, that warfare is written into our DNA. In the words of Winston Churchill: “The story of the human race is War. Except for brief and precarious interludes, there has never been peace in the world; and before history began, murderous strife was universal and unending.” But is Churchill’s warmongering state-of-nature any more plausible than Rousseau’s noble savage?

[…]

Comparisons with apes hardly resolve this issue. Since it has been found that chimpanzees sometimes raid their neighbors and take their enemies’ lives, these apes have edged closer to the warrior image that we have of ourselves. Like us, chimps wage violent battles over territory. Genetically speaking, however, our species is exactly equally close to another ape, the bonobo, which does nothing of the kind. Bonobos can be unfriendly to their neighbors, but soon after a confrontation has begun, females often rush to the other side to have sex with both males and other females. Since it is hard to have sex and wage war at the same time, the scene rapidly turns into a peaceful gathering. Lethal aggression among bonobos has been unheard of.

The danger in any discussion like this is that we might bind the sense of possibility for ourselves by what happens to be reflected in both human history and the natural world. That’s a false restraint; things can change. Social arrangements possible in the modern world, from the United Nations to mass genocide, would have after all been unthinkable in past ages. What we see among apes should expand our sense of human possibility but certainly not contract it.

Click for full-size chart and reference.

To Churchill’s point, one can just as easily say the opposite is true, and far more so. Peace reigns over ordinary life far more than war, even if it goes unnoticed while violence excites our attention. So much is this the case that, in the early history of anthropology, it was thought that “primitive” tribal societies were on the whole blessedly peaceful compared to the turbulence of modern states. Like the observations of chimpanzees for so long, this turned out to be the error of impatient observers; wait around long enough, and they will fight. And they will die, on average, at actually far higher rates than were found in Europe and the US in the 20th century (see chart).

De Waal insists in the end that, given the chance, humans and other animals will opt for less killing. We’re caught between ancient, dueling inclinations to kill and to coexist. The latter, he believes, is the stronger.

With the conclusion of the G20 protests in Canada, the inevitable post-mortem dissection has begun in earnest. Activists prepare to file lawsuits, organizers vow to do things differently next time, police pledge to investigate further, the media highlight the purported “destruction” before moving on to the next big story, and world leaders promise to continue their efforts unhampered by the misguided protesters. And, as is by now par for the post-protest course, pretty much everyone seems to cast blame on “the anarchists.”

More recently, in the aftermath of the Oscar Grant verdict in Oakland, the media fan the flames by blaming the few stray acts of window-breaking and looting on “self-described anarchists,” while police officials emphasize that this de facto terrorist segment justifies their conduct vis-à-vis protesters in general. More rifts develop in the streets, and although a tenuous solidarity is at times expressed as well, the lasting images once again are of anarchists acting in seemingly unproductive ways that put the interests and safety of larger movement contingents in jeopardy.

These are but two recent examples of a phenomenon that has been regularly played out in North America since at least the WTO protests in Seattle in 1999. Antipathy toward anarchists seems to have increased steadily since then, not only from corporate elites and law enforcement officials, but from a number of fellow movement participants as well. Ironically, this comes at a time when interest in anarchism among activists has greatly expanded, and likewise when its impact upon American activism in general has seen a strong resurgence in recent years.

Critical voices regularly chastise anarchists without indicating that they fully understand what anarchism actually is. But anarchists as well oftentimes seem to act in contravention of both historical and political senses of what anarchism represents. This is further made problematic by the basic fact that anarchists generally eschew doctrinaire definitions and ideological litmus tests, suggesting that people ought to be free to define their own actions and ideas in the manner of their own choosing. And yet, a kind of orthodoxy that increasingly seems like “fundamentalist anarchism” may be taking hold among some sectors that posture as “real revolutionaries,” who denigrate as “pathological” those who would seek to deploy their version of anarchism in less spectacular ways than overtly “smashing the state” by striking at some of its symbolic targets.

Interestingly, this plays right into the hands of the caricature of anarchism as violent, bomb-throwing, chaotic behavior that seems to be the first question one gets asked when their anarchism is presented in mixed company. Indeed, I always enjoy getting that inevitable query: “Isn’t anarchism just violence and destruction?” To which I usually reply: “How many people would you estimate have been killed by anarchists in the last hundred years? Now, how many would you say have been killed by liberals, or conservatives, in that time frame? If a lawyer or corporate manager were here before you now, would you ask about the blood on their hands or just let it slide as part of business as usual? The state didn’t save us from the violence of anarchy — it simply monopolized it, institutionalized it, and expanded its role in our lives.”

I recently had the opportunity to facilitate a series of workshops on “Anarchism and Nonviolence” in the U.S. and Canada. As one might expect, spirited conversations ensued in which many powerful young voices felt challenged by the notion of being nonviolent in a world that in their lifetimes has appeared as inherently violent. Indeed, these issues get at the heart of matters of ethics, tactics, and visions for the future, comprising some of the most basic concerns for social movements and individual consciences alike. One of the exercises we did in these workshops was to create a working definition of anarchism, and then one of nonviolence. Comparing the two lists, many overlapping values emerged: self-governance, rejection of domination, respect and mutual aid, antiwar and anti-oppression practices, solidarity, a radical egalitarianism, and the politics of “prefiguring” the future society. Further, it was pointed out that both notions, (an)archism and (non)violence, trace their linguistic origins to the negation of something — yet have developed proactive self-definitions despite an initial reactive framing.

And the synergies don’t end there. Among the anarchist milieu, we find figures such as Emma Goldman, who dabbled in the use of revolutionary violence in her younger days but came to reject it in her later years. She once told her comrade and coconspirator Alexander Berkman that “violence in whatever form never has and probably never will bring constructive results,” and further elucidated her position that “methods and means cannot be separated from the ultimate aim. The means employed become, through individual habit and social practice, part and parcel of the final purpose.” In the end, Goldman saw nonviolence and revolution as intertwined:

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At the Fletcher Summer Institute a couple weeks ago Hardy Merriman gave this insightful presentation on strategy and tactics for nonviolent resistance. For anyone new to the field, watching this video would be an easy way to get the basics.

In this video, Jack DuVall, the president of the International Center for Nonviolent Conflict and the co-author of A Force More Powerful, gives a good introduction to civil resistance at the Fletcher Summer Institute which I attended last week.

During Saturday’s nonviolent protest of about 5,000 activists outside the conference center in downtown Toronto, where leaders of the G20 were meeting, several hundred masked figures dressed in black broke away from and started torching police cars and smashing store fronts. Not only did this steal the attention away from the peaceful protesters, but it got a lot of them hurt and arrested. By the end of the day’s events, the police had beat activists and journalists, fired tear gas and rubber bullets and arrested more than 560 people.

Just about anyone following the G20 could have seen this coming. In the weeks before, Canada was busy building what The Guardian called “the toughest security cordon in the history of the summit,” spending an estimated $1 billion dollars and bringing in 19,000 police officers. So, clearly it was ready to use them. But more importantly, why was it so ready to use them?

Some might point to the threat of vandalism promised by a group of Ontario anarchists a month before the summit. In a message to its members, the Southern Ontario Anarchist Resistance (SOAR), announced its plan to stage “militant protests” and to “humiliate the security apparatus” by using “a variety of tactics”—a common phrase used by anarchists who perceive nonviolent action as ineffective. But as is so often the case, such dismissal stems from a complete lack of knowledge as to the dynamics of nonviolent action.

In what sounds like a reasonable appeal, SOAR told its members, “Respect for diversity of tactics also means not smashing things while we’re part of the labour child-friendly march, and remembering that although we might think certain tactics are pointless/annoying, we should not needlessly antagonize those people.”

What these anarchists don’t seem to realize is that nonviolent campaigns lose their power and are generally rendered pointless when they are associated with people who act violently.

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