The real switch — there’s a better path than increasingly lethal weaponry

All troubles in the world have their roots in mental chaos resulting from ignorance of the real nature and purpose of life.”
— Swami Ramdas

When the atomic bombs exploded over Japan in 1947, Gandhi said: “There used to be the so-called laws of war which made war tolerable, but now we know the naked truth, that war knows no law, except that of might. . .”

President Biden’s authorization of the use of cluster munitions in Ukraine perfectly illustrates this “naked truth.” We have condemned Russia for its war crimes, and then committed them ourselves. 

Back when the Allies had entered the war Gandhi further predicted, equally ominously, “The Allies will win, but in the process, they will have to become more brutal than Hitler, because they have chosen the same weapons.” At the time we didn’t know of any other weapon, of course; and surrender to Hitler was unthinkable. But in fact, there was another weapon. Gandhi had already perfected and tested what he called the “matchless weapon” of satyagraha, or nonviolent resistance; but it is only in the last 30 or so years that its application to war has become a real possibility. 

I will not elaborate here on unarmed civilian protection or the organizations doing it. Instead, I want to reflect on the dilemma we have created with cluster bombs and other atrocities to show that an entirely different approach — and there is one — is not a luxury but a matter of human survival.

There is a law, articulated by all the teachers of wisdom of humanity stating that you cannot visit violence on others without visiting it, in one or another shape, on oneself. In this connection it is interesting that just as the president has endorsed the sending of cluster bombs to Ukraine, manufacturers in this country have marketed a simple device called a “switch” (euphemisms are routine in the world of violence). This device allows anyone to convert an “ordinary” handgun into a kind of hand-held machine gun that can kill scores of people in seconds. We should let this sink in. 

A special legislative session was called recently after a lone assailant fired 152 rounds inside a Nashville Christian school, killing three nine-year-old children and three adults in less than 15 minutes. Imagine what he could have done with a switch! We have sleepwalked into a yet more grievous run of mass murders, sacrificing our children for a dubious profit of the most irresponsible few.

In today’s cultural climate we cannot expect the legislators to reach any effective conclusion. Cluster bombs are already illegal, for what that’s worth. It is up to us. We will be trapped in this madness until enough Americans say, “We will not have this; take these things away; this is not who we are.” 

In fact, who are we? Clearly, the image we entertain of who we are and what we can or cannot do predetermines what measures we can take when (we dare not say “if”) we rise up to stop the violence, against ourselves and others.

As it happens, the question of human nature within science has greatly improved within my (admittedly long) lifetime. When I was in school my biology teachers pronounced that we were “a primate with flat fingernails.” Inspiring. But now. scientists, perhaps a majority of them, are on record with descriptions of human nature that coincide with what those same wise teachers have been saying: We are body, mind and spirit 𑁋 or, in more scientific terms, consciousness. This realization opens up endless possibilities. As bodies we are, of course, separate; as minds we can meet; as consciousness we are one. 

The widespread phenomenon of moral injury is the negative side of this coin of our essential unity. Swami Ramdas, a beloved Indian saint who toured the United States on a mission of peace before his passing in 1963 said, in addition to the quote at the beginning, “Man’s forgetfulness of his true . . . nature is the cause of ignorance and sorrow.” H.G. Wells had said 40 years earlier, “civilization is always a race between education and catastrophe,” and now we can specify what kind of education will head off the catastrophe of violence we are stumbling into. It is education into the essential unity, which as many believe, is tantamount to the sanctity of life. Grasp that, and violence of any kind, domestic and international, becomes unthinkable. Nonviolence becomes the only real method available.

This, then, is the real switch: Instead of finding yet another way to kill, we can find there is another way than killing.