“Bernard? Oh yeah, he’s great. He was always the principles guy.”
That was what an old Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC, organizer told me when I mentioned that I had been trained by Bernard Lafayette, co-author of the Kingian Nonviolence curriculum and a legend of the civil rights era.
“I was always a strategies guy,” this elder went on to tell me. “I believed in nonviolence as an effective strategy, but Bernard was always talking about nonviolence as a principle.”
I let out a little laugh. In that moment, I was proud to have been trained by “the principles guy.”
When people talk about nonviolence in the context of social change, they’re typically talking about nonviolent organizing, nonviolent direct action, nonviolent civil resistance; arenas where the word “nonviolence” is only an adjective describing the absence of physical violence within a set of tactics and strategies. The philosophy of nonviolence and the moral question of violence are often considered too messy or complicated, even by those who do believe it to be a principle.
The civil rights movement was led largely by leaders who believed in nonviolence as a moral imperative. It was not only the most effective thing, but also the right thing. While Martin Luther King Jr. and his closest allies held to this belief, some other movement leaders — as well as the vast majority of people who mobilized for the movement — only understood nonviolence as a strategy.
Most of the movements I have participated in, even those that had a strict policy of nonviolence, tend to shy away from the moral question — possibly for fear of turning away potential participants.
And I get that. Making the argument that nonviolence should be seen as a way of life is a much harder sell than convincing people that it is the most effective strategy to accomplish a goal. Convincing people to remain nonviolent during a demonstration is a lot easier than convincing people to look at how to practice nonviolence in all areas of our life.
We find ourselves in an urgent moment in history. From climate change to the Trump agenda, we do not have the luxury to wait until tomorrow. We need a movement today. So maybe trying to make the moral argument is not the most strategic thing.
But King taught us that it is never the wrong time to do the right thing. And so, I believe the time is right to make the argument that violence itself is our biggest enemy.
Honoring violence
Making the moral argument for nonviolence does not mean placing a moral judgment on those who use or advocate for violence, especially as a means for self-defense.
As an advocate for nonviolence, I have learned a great deal from the likes of the Black Panther Party, the Zapatistas, the Deacons for Defense and the anarchists in the Spanish Civil War, among others. Their struggles and sacrifices should never be discounted, nor should we ignore the many lessons from their movements.
We should also never judge those who have used violence for self-defense in interpersonal relationships — abusive relationships, robberies, assaults, etc. If people felt like that was their only means of protecting themselves, I only pray that they were okay.
Finally, we need to acknowledge the extreme levels of violence that many people are born into because of systemic injustice. We put people into generations of poverty and invest in a culture of violence, then judge them for reacting with violence? As inarticulate as it may be, even riots are typically a cry for peace from a people who have never had it.
So violence can be an effective tool to protect yourself and others against a threat, and it can be used to express outrage about injustice. There is great value in both.
Yet violence is also limited in one very important way, and that is that violence can never create relationships.
Violence can never get you closer to reconciliation, closer to King’s “beloved community,” the reconciled world with justice for all people. And that is perhaps the most significant difference between a principled nonviolent approach and an approach using violence or nonviolence that is strictly strategic. The goals are different.
Resolution vs. reconciliation
In movements that are violent or simply use nonviolent tactics, the goal is victory, where victory is defined as “your” people beating “those” people to win your demands. The victory is over your opponents. But in a principled approach, there is no victory until you’ve won your opponents over.
In a principled nonviolent approach, the goal is always reconciliation and steps toward beloved community. The goal is always to build and strengthen relationships and to bring people and communities together, not separate them. If we are not able to find ways to bring communities together, we will always have separation, violence and injustice.
Even if you are able to achieve short-term gains, if relationships between people were harmed in the conflict and you are further away from each other as a result, then it is not a victory at all. If only your tactics are nonviolent and not your worldview, whatever issue you’re working on may get resolved, but the relationships don’t get repaired.
It was a team of incarcerated Kingian Nonviolence trainers in Soledad Prison that taught me this during a conversation we were having about the difference between conflict resolution and conflict reconciliation.
Conflict resolution is about fixing issues. Conflict reconciliation is about repairing relationships. Resolving an issue is about the mind. It’s about policies, structures, laws — the causes of violence. Reconciling a relationship is about the heart. It’s about the people, the stories, the history — the human impact of violence.
The levels of violence today are so heightened that there will be times when movements will need to use assertive and militant nonviolent tactics to stop the immediate harm and demand change.
As Marshall Rosenberg, the founder of nonviolent communication, says, we need to, “use the minimum amount of force necessary to stop the immediate harm.” And we never think about what the “minimum amount” looks like.
That is the realm of nonviolent strategies and tactics like noncooperation and civil disobedience. Tactics that could stop the construction of a pipeline, pass voter protection laws or even lead to a political revolution.
But if we stop there, the relationships between the communities are still divided, and there could still be fear, mistrust and resentment. If the human relationships are not healed, the conflict will resurface again on some other issue. Any peace gained through political revolution but not a revolution of relationships is short-lived.
Reconciliation is what a principled nonviolent approach demands.
The need for healing
The very nature of violence is unjust. As Rev. James Lawson, one of the lead trainers for the civil rights movement, has said, “Violence has a very simple dynamic. I make you suffer more than I suffer. I make you suffer until you cry uncle.” It is the very idea that we can use force, fear and intimidation to get what we want that is our enemy.
Because violence hurts. Period.
We all know that. We’ve all experienced it — physical, emotional and spiritual. It hurts to get punched, but it hurts more to feel abandoned, alone, ashamed, hopeless, desperate, unworthy, afraid, used. And too often, we are made to feel those things by people in our own families, in our own movements, in our own communities.
Being committed to a principled approach to nonviolence requires us to look at the pain that we carry ourselves, and the pain that we inflict on each other within our communities. It is easy to point the finger and say that the violence is “over there.”
I have talked to too many people who shared that the traumas they carry were only re-triggered and made worse by the violence they witnessed within movements. When we say that we are committed to nonviolence, we are not only saying that we want to stop the violence “over there” that “those people” are committing. We also try to work on the ways we ourselves perpetuate harm as a result of our own unhealed traumas. We are working to heal our own selves as much as anyone we perceive as our enemies. We are working to change how we relate to each other in own communities as much as we are working to change any policy.
Whether you live in an impoverished community or work in law enforcement where your job is to dehumanize people all day, we are not a healthy society. It hurts to witness violence, it hurts to experience violence, and it hurts to inflict violence. Each causes trauma.
Yes, we need to fight. But only so that we can create spaces to heal and to build.
Beloved community
“We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny,” King wrote in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail. “Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
This universal truth comes out in many cultures and traditions throughout the world. The aboriginal peoples in Australia teach us, “If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”
That is the vision of beloved community. A world where we acknowledge our interdependence — our “inter-being,” as Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh says.
My liberation is bound up in yours. That is a beautiful concept, and a popular quote in many progressive circles. But to what extent do we really believe it? Is our liberation bound up with the liberation of some and not others? How about people who voted for Donald Trump or people who have hurt us personally? Who draws that line? Do some people fall out of the “network of mutuality” that King talked about?
What does it look like to work together to “liberate” those who commit harm? What does it mean to acknowledge that being oppressed hurts, but being an oppressor also destroys your soul? The privileges of being an oppressor doesn’t take away the violence that gets internalized when you hurt someone.
Beloved community is not about loving the people who are easy to love. It is about cultivating “agape” — a Greek word for unconditional love for all of humanity, including those who are difficult to love.
King said that the civil rights movement was a movement for the bodies of black folks and the souls of white folks. He acknowledged that being a white supremacist destroys your soul. To have so much judgment and hatred in your heart is an act of violence you do to yourself, and part of the goal of the movement was to help them. To bring them back into the network of mutuality and to remind them that they are part of beloved community.
Because our liberation depends on it.
Faith in people
The core of the theory of nonviolence for me has become an unwavering faith in the nature of humanity. That at our core, we are a species that wants to live in peace and wants to be in service and relationship; that we have the resiliency to heal no matter how hurt we are, and we have the ability to transform no matter how much harm we’ve caused.
We get asked all the time in our workshops, “Well, isn’t violence just part of human nature?” And I used to struggle responding to it, because it was hard to argue. It has always been part of our history.
Then several years ago, I met Paul Chappell, a graduate of West Point turned peace activist. During his presentation at a conference, he said that every study that has ever been conducted shows that violence is traumatic. It can cause PTSD, depression, anxiety and permanent damage to our brain. And yet not a single person has ever been traumatized by an act of love.
He then asked, “If violence is part of our nature, then why does it short-circuit our brain?” Shouldn’t we be able to engage in it and not have it cause permanent damage?
That to him was evidence that violence isn’t in our nature, that at the core of human nature are the things that fulfill us: love, joy, community, peace.
And that is what we need today: a determined and dogged belief in the goodness of people. We need the fierce tactics of nonviolence to stop the immediate harm, and the principles of nonviolence to transform the pain. Without one or the other, we are always going to be spinning our wheels, fighting the next injustice or addressing the next hurt.
I’ve been very privileged in my life. I’ve gotten to see so many people transformed from the most violent circumstances, that it might be easier for me to have faith in people. It is the greatest honor being able to work with incarcerated communities. Everyday, I get to learn from people who have survived so much violence and in many cases have inflicted so much harm, yet have transformed to become some of the greatest peacemakers I’ve ever met. It gives me faith in the resiliency of people and in the core of human nature.
And if I can have faith in their core and their ability to transform, why not the prison guards? Why not the politician who passed the laws that filled the prison? Or the corporate lobbyist who pushed for that legislation? Or the conservative voter who put those lawmakers into office?
It may take seven generations, but if we are not working for a world that works for all of us, then what exactly are we working for? If we are working to change laws and policies, but the hearts and minds of the people are still corrupt and we still see each other as exactly that — “others” — will we ever know peace?
We are in need of a truly nonviolent revolution, not just of systems and policies, but also of worldviews and relationships. We need to understand that people are never the enemy, that violence and injustice itself is what we need to defeat, and that the goal of every conflict must be reconciliation.
Each conflict we face has to be seen as an opportunity to strengthen understanding between members of a human family that have grown so far apart that we have forgotten our dependence on each other.
That is why we need a principled nonviolent approach to society’s ills. Because it is not just laws and systems that have poisoned us. It is a worldview that has made us forget that our liberation is bound up in the liberation of all people.
And only a holistic nonviolent approach — one that involves both strategies and principles — can muster the force to stop injustice in its tracks while bringing communities towards reconciliation.
Wow! This is congruent, I believe, with a concept I have found and try to embrace (not easy to do) that all conflict is based on fear. That if I can find the basis for your fear and work to alleviate it, the conflict will lessen and die.
I often forget to look at my own fears in this light and thusly neglect those core issues.
Thank you for the article. I hope it makes me work harder to alleviate my fears and the fears of those who I come in contact with.
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Yes, please, and thank you. So beautifully articulated.
Good article. Thank you for reminding us we need BOTH strategic nonviolence and reconciliation. But the two are not necessarily as incompatible as you imply.
While it is true that violence and strategic nonviolence may have similar goals, their effects are very different. Strategic nonviolence is coercive, but does far less damage to relationships than violence. If your family was murdered by your opponent, you’re less likely to be open to conciliation than if your opponent used nonviolent methods. That’s one advantage of nonviolence, whether strategic or principled – less polarization.
I agree that many practitioners of strategic nonviolence sometimes place too much emphasis on the mechanics of winning a particular campaign. They often fail in the long run because not enough effort went into the vital work of popular empowerment – developing a robust civil society, building community unity, and increasing the skills/capacity to hold the ruling class accountable – to ensure any victories can be defended and sustained.
The “beloved community,” is an admirable ideal, but if that is our only goal we will find ourselves increasingly dominated by the realists who know how to wield power and have no qualms about using it to the max. Beloved communities won’t thrive in a world of stark economic disparities, populated by oppressed, powerless masses. Reconciliation is possible only when there is justice, and justice cannot be won simply by loving our enemies.
To add anything would diminish the simplicity and completeness of this message. Thank you for it, namaste.
Thank you Kazu. I’m looking forward to hearing more at the Satyagraha Institute in the Black Hills this August.
Congratulations, I have enjoyed so much your article that I have translated it into Spanish and publish it on my web:
http://noviolenta.es/blog/2017/05/13/por-que-el-argumento-moral-para-la-noviolencia-importa/
I hope you understand my enthusiasm as not to ask for permission until I publised it.
Thank you for this piece Kazu. I encourage you to consider expanding the beloved community beyond humans to nonhuman animals too (“each conflict we face has to be seen as an opportunity to strengthen understanding between members of a human family…”).
Uplifting, articulate, strong idealism that I believe in wholeheartedly. Thank you from another member of the Kingian Nonviolence work.
Just got around to this article.
I’ve read a lot of arguments (some strong, some weak) making the case for and against nonviolence, and I have to say, in the ranks of the former, this piece stands out to me as one of the strongest.
I admire your cogent reasoning, and envy your experience at witnessing such transformation up close.
My one reservation – and you’ll note I’m discussing a very minor point in the article – is your choice to list “conservative voters” at the end of your list of people who are capable of transformation. First because placing them after “prison guards,” “politicians,” and “corporate lobbyists” in your list of opponents gives the impression that “conservative voters” are the worst of the lot, or at least the ones whose values are most oppositional to our own. Second, because your characterization of conservative voters putting “those lawmakers into office” belies the fact – often pointed out by your fellow columnist George Lakey – that the United States electoral system is not and never was democratic, and it’s therefore inaccurate and unwise to conflate the policies of lawmakers with the values of the people who voted for them too closely.
I’m not denying that there are plenty of points of disagreement I have with conservative voters, or many issues which I believe necessitate transformation of the kind you describe. However, I think we on the left tend to overemphasize our differences with rank-and-file conservatives – a tendency which the ruling elite and their minions in the media and elsewhere do everything they can to encourage, under the time honored “divide and rule” strategy.
With that one caveat, I am deeply impressed with and grateful for this very insightful, well-reasoned, and highly compassionate article. Thank you.
Also, I wanted to say how much I appreciate that you honor and respect the people who have used or advocated violence, such as the Black Panthers, at the beginning of your piece. As I said, I’ve seen many arguments on both sides of the issue, and I often see somebody arguing in favor of one position pathologizing the proponents and practitioners of the other, explaining their position away as being rooted in some personal neurosis or other (come to think of it, I suppose that’s how proponents of the status quo view activists in general). While I find this tendency understandable, I’ve seen too many strong arguments and know too many good, caring, intelligent people on both sides of the debate.
If we’re committed to a holistic nonviolence approach and to building a truly beloved community, we have to find ways to disagree with our violence-positive compatriots while still expressing our love and solidarity for them.
I just stumbled onto your fine article and I am very impressed, so much so that I’m going to reprint it in our peace and justice newspaper dedicated to the promotion of nonviolence. However, when speaking of the police, we should not lose the individual humanity of a police person in generalizations about police as a whole. It is not the job of a policeman to “dehumanize people all day.” My son is a policeman and that is not what he does all day. My son is the man who ran into a burning trailer to save a two-year-old child from a suicidal father. He is the man who reaches into his pocket to give money to a homeless person when they don’t have any. I certainly recognize that there are people who are police who should never be found in that occupation. And, there are certainly dysfunctional departments who have officers who profile people because of their color, and brutalize them as well. And there are officers who lose control in situations where they shouldn’t. However, there are many good people in law enforcement who actually try to do their jobs well without dehumanizing the people they encounter. My son is one of them.
Amazing article, Kazu. One that I will share in my graduate courses on Diversity and Oppression. Thank you for synthesizing what we have learned from Doc, and adding your personal experiences! You inspire me. I hope to do the same type of work with my future Peace Center
Kim
Truly excellent and thought provoking article. I loved it and love seeing deep conversations about values. I had some alternative ideas. I feel nonviolent strategy is not always about winning, but is also about preventing violence or asserting a position ( my friends who protest drones, are trying to make people aware of the harm being caused). The problem I have with nonviolence as a principle, is that having looked deep in my own soul I see how much violence is there, so for me to a assert non violence as a principle would be a pretense, as a strategy it may bring out the best in me despite my real struggles with anger, self-righteousness, etc and until that day I am redeemed. It also allows me to walk that path in all my imperfection. Also I am not God and cannot know what is ultimately causing the greatest harm, I I like the allowances for that in his argument about not judging those who believe and act differently. We can try to figure it out. The Dalai Lama says a parent who spanks a child that runs into a road , who is trying however imperfectly to save their child’s life is not violent, but the person who is very kind to our face, as some folks in my neighborhood are doing to one of our neighbors== but: signing petitions against that neighbor rather than engaging the conversation, are violent. A big tenet of the United Methodist Church is , first do no harm, but I find it impossible, my mother had a stroke after a flu shot. Her doctor intended health, but did her harm. She died within days, would she have without a flu shot containing mercury? I find life so complex. What I love is the deep thinking in the article, the unmasking of some of the downsides of non violence as a strategy, the willingness to take a stand, and I can only the think the author is a much finer person than I am or have been and likely will be except by the grace of God, on whom I rely to bring beloved community. .
sign me up,