Last weekend I had an opinion piece published in the Melbourne Age, a major Australian daily newspaper. It was responding to the recent scandal of gunsights used by Australian, New Zealand and U.S. soldiers having been inscribed with Biblical references. This story gave me the opportunity to clarify both the fact that Christianity is intended to be nonviolent, and that nonviolence is never passive in the face of injustice or oppression.
There were a number of comments after the original article, and the discussion has continued in the letters to the editor. Two objections were raised in Monday’s newspaper, and two responses to the objections appeared in Tuesday’s paper.
It’s a rare event when nonviolence (let alone Christianity!) gets a run in the mainstream media in Australia. This was a source of great encouragement.
It also made clear just how far we have to go in explaining and communicating nonviolence. Two things in particular frustrated me.
1. It doesn’t seem to matter how often you say that nonviolence is not passivity, people will continually object on the assumption that nonviolence is passive.
2. It might seem pedantic, but the pervasive editing of the correct ‘nonviolence’ to the incorrect ‘non-violence’ is a demonstration of the kind of misunderstanding nonviolence receives in mainstream culture.
Have a look and see what you think.
Do you really think the difference between “nonviolence” and “non-violence” is anything but stylistic? After all, I have a book by Gandhi (edited and assembled by others, though) called Non-violent Resistance. I tend, like you, to favor “nonviolence” if only because it is one baby step closer to being a single, cohesive concept, rather than simply the negation of violence. But, that said, I don’t think it’s worth the trouble of calling people out for using the hyphen. Much better to focus on your all too true (and frustrating!) point #1.
I agree with you that it’s not really a hill to die on, it’s more the way it exacerbates the misunderstandings described in point #1 (which is why they’re connected). It’s not so much the hyphen itself (though I’m a big fan of punctuation when used correctly, and a self-confessed pedant about these things) as the misunderstanding it represents. In my experience nonviolence practitioners don’t hyphenate it, and this is at least partly because of an understanding of its active nature rather than simply a non-something.
I guess I don’t so much call people out for using the hyphen as use it as an opportunity to educate them. So in that sense it’s worth the trouble.
Interesting your article. My friends in Neotopia and I think that it’s almost due time that we use a different word than nonviolence; there’s psychoilogical reasons (brain doesn’t register negation and so we speak of “violence” altogether), semantic ones (ahimsa, the original term used by Gandhy, like Dharma is a complex concept which doesn’t easily translate in another culture) and historical (Gandhi hammered out the word Satyagraha fot this very purpose: to better express the concept. In italian the first to suggest the writing nonviolece without the hyphen was philosopher Aldo Capitini and he did a deep point in explaining the profound reason of trying to overcome the limits of a translated concept written with a negation at the beginning. It’s not only style, I think. But what is more important is that every way we find to spread the concept of proactiveness of nonviolence does some good. NV is a fight against injustice holding to truth. Therefore we should revert to the sacred word Satyagraha. And read Vinoba Bhave who taught hou to mean and live it in moden times.
One more thing: A very good example of nonviolent resistance against the nazis is Denmark; don’t forget that Hannah Arendt recommended Danish experience to be taught wherever there was a school. Peace and harmony to all.
Federico