Mahatma Gandhi’s granddaughter Ela Gandhi (A Piece of My Mind / John Noltner)

Resisting the corrosive power of consumerism — a conversation with Ela Gandhi

The granddaughter of Mahatma Gandhi discusses growing up in her family’s intentional community and the importance of self-sufficiency.
Mahatma Gandhi’s granddaughter Ela Gandhi (A Piece of My Mind / John Noltner)

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This week Nonviolence Radio hosts Ela Gandhi, granddaughter of Mahatma Gandhi, herself a peace activist and committed supporter of nonviolence. Ela was raised in the Phoenix Settlement, an ashram established by Gandhi in 1904 and dedicated to the value of self-sufficiency, a profound concern for the natural world and promoting human dignity for all. In this episode, hosts Stephanie Van Hook and Michael Nagler talk to Ela about her life, the corrosive power of consumerism in our world today, the importance of actively modeling compassion, decency and kindness, and the crucial Gandhian idea of constructive program:

…at Phoenix Settlement, we encouraged people to do their own growing of vegetables and so on. That was one way in which people became self-sufficient. Also, in little skills to make them less dependent on the mainline economy. This is building up your own economic activity so that you become self-sufficient, so that you’re not dependent on the people who are actually exploiting you. That’s the one thing.

The second thing is that you are not supporting the exploitative mechanism. By becoming independent or dependent on yourself rather than on these economic giants, you’re making a statement and you’re also showing that, at the end of the day, they depend on us as consumers. And if we stop consuming what they produce, then it makes them think, it makes them reassess what they are doing. That’s one of the ways in which one indicates to people that we are unhappy about the way you are doing things.

“Constructive program” emerges as one of the most empowering and effective tools nonviolent activists can use to push back against oppressive forces and set up a more just and peaceful world.

Stephanie: Greetings everybody and welcome to another episode of Nonviolence Radio. I’m your host, Stephanie Van Hook and I’m here in the studio with my co-host and news anchor Michael Nagler for the Nonviolence Report. And we’re from the Metta Center for Nonviolence. On today’s show, we have the opportunity to speak with a very special person all the way from South Africa. She’s a peace activist, working tirelessly for the well being of humanity all of her life. And she also happens to be the granddaughter of Mahatma Gandhi, Ela Gandhi is with us today.

Thank you so much, Ela, for joining us today on Nonviolence Radio.

Ela: Thank you so much. It’s a pleasure to be on this program.

Stephanie: You know, most people when they hear your name, Ela Gandhi, they associate you right away with the work of your grandfather, but you yourself, your life has been so interesting and so rich that I’d like to focus on letting people get to know you as Ela first and how you’ve been working in the field of nonviolence, that’s been inspired, of course, by your grandfather. But how you’ve gone beyond it as well.

So, you were born in Phoenix Settlement. Can you tell us a little bit about what that place was and what it meant to the struggles in South Africa?

Ela: Phoenix Settlement was set up by Gandhiji in 1904. It was a time when he decided that he needed to change his lifestyle. His thoughts were already changing over a period of time because when he came to South Africa, he had a completely different outlook to life. He, you know, was quite – as a lawyer, he was status conscious. He was also a person who had a number of hang-ups about things, about lifestyle and about what civilization should be and all that kind of thing.

Over a period of time, he began to realize that we are all equal. There’s no status. There shouldn’t be this kind of hierarchy of status and all that. And he said about this work, he says, “Good as a lawyer’s work.” That was one of his understandings by 1904.

He also began to see that in life, living close to the earth is a very important thing. The whole idea of food security, of growing your own vegetables, of becoming self-sufficient, living the kind of life that supports itself, to fully live.

So, he decided to move away from the city and look amongst the poverty-stricken people of the country. So on the one side, you have the sugar workers, the indentured workers who were brought from India. On the other side was a [Shimbek] community, which was an African community, a religious group that had a place over there. And then on the other side of the farm was the Dube settlement. Mr. Dube was the first president of the ANC, and it was called, “The Native Council” at that time. But eventually, it became the African National Congress.

So, he came in an interesting boundary of people, amongst whom he decided to go and look and to interact with these people and see what their struggles were. And also, to look at his own struggle in changing his lifestyle, from a place where he had all the luxury to a place where there was no electricity. There was no running water. There was no services whatsoever in that particular area. It was completely rural community with no services.

So he had to begin to learn how to live in that situation, and that story is a very interesting story, as to how he learned conservation. He learned about health by looking at the healthy ways of living. He looked at the whole food issue, how food – the vegetarian diet he talked about – you know, before he left for London, he had promised his mother that he wouldn’t eat meat.

His vegetarianism was sort of vegetarian because it was compulsory, because he had promised his mother. But by the time he came to South Africa, it was already by conviction that he was a vegetarian. And he felt that that was a good way of living a healthy lifestyle.

At Phoenix, this was an experiment, and also about natural cure, how you can take care of little illnesses that people have, and the use of clay soil to heal, the use of water as a healing mechanism, and things like that. Those were some of the experiments that he engaged in at Phoenix Settlement. And that is where I was born. Because he left that legacy for my father and my mother as well. And that’s the lifestyle that my father and my mother engaged in.

So, when I was born, I grew into that particular ethos of sensibility, of growing close to nature, and taking care of your health, and learning about self-sufficiency and that sort of thing.

Stephanie: That’s very, very beautiful. And I bet it was a very interesting childhood. Now, I read that your mother started a school at the ashram, and I wonder if you can talk a little bit about the process of education why you left the ashram school, for example.

Ela: Okay, so my mother was a victim of what happened in India. She was from India, born in India, and she – because, you know, they boycotted the English school — she had to leave soon after she would have gone to high school. Her parents decided that they’re going to boycott the school. And that was in the middle of the nonviolence campaigns in India.

So, she valued education. And my grandfather and my father supported her in her whole, you know, her whole learning process. And then she decided that she wanted to change the path of education for the other children who don’t have a school to go to. At that time, schools were limited in numbers and many children did not have access to a school, to schooling. Particularly, African children, but also Indian children.

And so, she just started in a little room, thinking that she’ll get about 10-15 people and be able to teach them. But before long she had like 300 children and had no accommodations. And then they discovered — you know, the eyes of the government fell on the school. The government said that you can’t teach African children because they had segregation in schooling. So, they had to opt for an Indian school because Indians could only run an Indian school. They couldn’t have an African school and so they had to opt for that. That was a great disappointment for her because she had a really good group going in this building, which was a very small building, but it was still inadequate for so many children.

But the fact was that the children were there — and then also the fact that, you know, girls should be educated. They should have access to education. The whole idea of equality between the genders and all that, those were some of the things that my father learned. And my mother was also quite a strong person and so, as she looked at Phoenix, she grew into this whole ethos of equality – gender equality, education for girls and so on. So that was one of the motivations for her to run this school. And of course, my father supported her in all those things. They worked together as a team. He worked in the printing press which was quite a hectic affair because everything – it was a weekly newspaper that used to be brought to us, but the printing and writing, not just published or — you know, put this together. But we actually did everything at Phoenix Settlement.

And every alphabet had to be put together to make sentences — this was a really manual printing outfit at Phoenix Settlement. And she learned everything about it and knew exactly how to run the whole press. And for many years after my father passed away, she continued with the press, and that moved the Phoenix Settlement.

Stephanie: And your father was Manilal Gandhi? Gandhi’s second?

Ela: Second son, yes.

Stephanie: And now, for our listeners, what I’d like them to understand about nonviolence is that this is more than just starting schools, right? This is more than just having a newspaper. What was – this is what we call in nonviolence, “Constructive program”: building the alternatives when the system is corrupt, when there is something broken about the system. Instead of resisting it, you build the alternative.

I wonder if you could speak to that a little bit more, about what constructive program therefore means to you as somebody who grew up as helping to perpetuate it, helping to grow it.

Ela: Yeah. So, at Phoenix Settlement, we encouraged people to do their own growing of vegetables and so on. That was one way in which people became self-sufficient. Also, in little skills to make them less dependent on the mainline economy. This is building up your own economic activity so that you become self-sufficient, so that you’re not dependent on the people who are actually exploiting you. That’s the one thing.

The second thing is that you are not supporting the exploitative mechanism. By becoming independent or dependent on yourself rather than on these economic giants, you’re making a statement and you’re also showing that, at the end of the day, they depend on us as consumers. And if we stop consuming what they produce, it makes them think. It makes them reassess what they are doing. That’s one of the ways in which one indicates to people that we are unhappy about the way you are doing things.

That can only be done if you’re engaging in this kind of constructive program, and building your own economy which can then resist the mainline economy. Today we see that there’s a lot of interconnectedness, but yet there is a lot of exploitation. And that exploitation needs to be resisted. I think that even now today we can begin to look at self-sufficiency and things like that.

Gandhiji was very much interested by this idea of the people. And although people are a small sort of – they haven’t grown into huge settlements that can influence the world. But it is a model that the world can follow. If we build up that kind of a model, we can build a society where there’s more equity than there is at the present moment. It’s in the inequality that is the bane of modern life.

Stephanie: Now, for those of you just tuning in, we’re speaking with Ela Gandhi all the way from South Africa. Ela happens to be the granddaughter of Mahatma Gandhi, and she is a peace activist and scholar in her own right for nonviolence. So, we’re very happy to have her.

Ela, as you speak of your time in Gandhi’s first ashram, Phoenix Settlement, and some of his influences and values, I’m struck by the idea that it could be challenging for people to come together and live together in these settings, in ashram settings, and kibbutz settings. What has your experience been that makes those kinds of environments work? Because even though coming together and wanting to live in a self-sufficient way is an ideal, when we come in, we’re human beings with our own problems and our own personalities and drawbacks. Can you speak a little bit to what it’s like living in those situations, and what helps keep your eyes on the higher goal?

Ela: I think the biggest problem is the materialism that has overtaken the world. Today in the modern world people have become more and more materialistic. Humans are values are seen as secondary to the materialistic values. The people’s wants have increased, they want access to so many different things.

I was talking to somebody today, and we have a lot of unemployment, and we were trying to set up a program where we could help some of the communities who were suffering from poverty and deprivation and see if we can get food and things to them. When we discussed the issue of what people would like to have, some of the things they talked about were cosmetics. And we were just thinking, food is essential, but our cosmetics are nearly essential, especially when you are trying to sort of bring out the human nature in people, to offer food security to other people.

If we were to go and tell them that look, we need cosmetics for the community, are they going to give you that sort of thing? Are they going to take you seriously? That’s the kind of materialism that has overtaken all of us. On the other hand – flip side of the coin is that if you are poor, why is it that it’s wrong for you to want cosmetics? Are cosmetics only for the rich people? So, this is the other argument.

And in between lies a whole lot of ideas that are based on Gandhian ideas of simplicity, of being able to look at nature, and what nature has given us, to see how it can be equitably distributed. Because if the resources we have are equitably distributed, everybody will have a chance to live a good life, a good, healthy life. It’s because of this skewed distribution, where some have too much and others have nothing.

Now, to redistribute that, one has to find a mechanism, and within that mechanism, acceptance, they can’t replace whole cosmetics. Somebody had to ask Gandhiji once, when he started the spinning wheel, they told him that this cotton that we weave out of hand-spun cotton, the cloth that we weave is really thick. You know, it’s not the kind of cloth that we would want to wear in the hot weather in India. The one that’s made out of machines is a lighter cloth, it’s cooler to wear and things like that.

So, Gandhiji’s answer to this person was that you can, by learning how to spin properly, you can begin to spin a very fine thread and produce a beautiful, fine cloth. It just means learning and practicing to be able to perfect your art. Because at the end of the day, it’s an art. The spinning is an art. Weaving is an art. And you can produce the most beautiful cloth. You don’t have to have a machine to produce the beautiful cloth. So, that was Gandhiji’s answer.

And what I’m saying is that there shouldn’t be certain things that are only available to the rich while the poor have no access to them. The poor also can have access to things, you know, like cosmetics and so on. I don’t know. I don’t think Gandhiji would like cosmetics. He said, “God has given you a beautiful face, why do you have to apply other things on that face?”

People want these things, and you can’t tell them, “Look, you know, the rich people can have it, and you are poor, so you can’t have it,” you know?

Stephanie: There’s some sense of dignity when people can have what everybody can have, or what has been denied to them. But what I hear you saying is we need to really, you know, re-evaluate what gives us dignity and not just the imitation of materialist values — but how do we turn back to human values? You really connected that with the Earth, with our basic needs. How silly it is for us to base our dignity on materialist needs, and how we can change that conversation?

I also hear you saying that, in a way, human beings absorbed the values of those around them. We are most like sponges. You know, materialism affects all of us because we’re just – we’re soaking in it all of the time. So, spaces that are like intentional communities and ashrams and kibbutz are opportunities to absorb different kinds of values which can then help change society. If we come in as imperfect human beings — just like spinning and weaving, these are arts — we can make, with these values, a kind of an art. They can become finer and more subtle and more powerful the more we treat it like an art, not as something that either we do well or we fail at. I think your life models that in so many ways.

I’ve also heard you say in a talk or in a book that I read about you, that you apply this as well to children’s education. I’ve heard something about if children simply had compassionate adults around them that modeled compassion for them, then society would look very different. Can you speak to that a little bit? About that kind of true education?

Ela: Yeah. So, you know, from my perspective, from what I’ve heard and understood, children learn more from watching than from being told. So if teachers tell them, “Look, smoking is bad,” for instance, and then they are smoking, the children are likely to learn smoking because even if you tell them that it’s bad, they have seen the teacher smoking. So, how can it be bad, you know? That is how children would think and learn.

They learn from watching and seeing their peers; that’s educators, their peers in school, and so on, from each other and from the family, parents, and so on. If they grow up in an environment where there’s a lot of violence — and this is what we are seeing in South Africa at the moment,  many children are exposed to domestic violence and violence in the community and so on. And so, when they grow up, they also believe that violent ways are the only ways in which they can survive, you know? They can’t survive without violence.

So, absolutely, we have to have people who would be examples themselves, and this is what we’ve been teaching. We run programs with particularly the early childhood learning period because that is the period when the child’s basic understanding of life is developed, in the first 10 years of the child’s life.Those years, in preschool and in family school, are very important. That is the time when one needs to have really good teachers who can impart good values. And that doesn’t happen through lecturing. It happens through example.

So, yeah, this is what we’ve been telling the teachers – and not just telling them, but showing them how this is important, how children can learn if the teachers are not careful about how they conduct themselves within that environment. If for instance, in an early childhood setting, if there’s a lot of friction amongst the teachers themselves, the children see this and they see that, well, you know, shouting at each other, hitting out at each other, bad language, bad communication, all those things they learn. They learn from the way the teachers behave.

That’s why I think it’s important for them to behave differently in the schools. And we found that there was a tremendous change in the whole atmosphere in the school after we had had those discussions with the teachers and the training program that we imparted in the schools.

Stephanie: And to transition a little bit to get a fuller picture of your life, Ela, I’d love to go in a little bit to how your anti-apartheid activism, because as I hear you talking about these values and how you lived, the fact that you were banned from political activism and you were under house arrest, can you speak to that time in your life and what it was like to live under apartheid and how you participated and helping to heal that in some ways?

Ela: I think what we are experiencing at the moment, in a small way, tells you what our life was like. Because of the lockdown conditions under COVID, the regulations sort of restrict your movements, your communications, your social life and all those things. Well, that’s exactly what happened to us by force. And by force of an order from the Ministry of Justice rather than because nature determines that there’s going to be a COVID outbreak, that one needs to concerns, which is what’s happening at the moment.

One can see how difficult life is under lockdown, and that is what our life was like under lockdown. We couldn’t go out. And I’m saying ‘we’ because my husband was also under house arrest during that time, both of us were banned and both of us were under house arrest. And our children grew up under those conditions.

So it was a very, very difficult time. We couldn’t participate in school activities that our children participated in. We couldn’t go to the school. You’re not allowed to enter a school. If we had to admit a child to a school in the first years, we couldn’t ourselves enter that school. We had to get special permission to say that we’re just parents. We have to go and sign documents in the school. It was the permission to go to the school. And then with the permits, we were allowed to go into the school, otherwise, you’re not allowed to enter school premises.

And after a certain time in the evening, like we have curfews and a lockdown at the moment, we had to be indoors from a certain time in the evening to a certain time in the morning. It was like 7 o’clock in the evening to 7 o’clock in the morning. You couldn’t leave the house no matter what the emergency.

Stephanie: But I heard you did leave the house?

Ela: Well, sometimes, you know, one takes a chance. Because that was not like the present, as I said, you know? This is nature’s way of telling us that we have to have this lockdown conditions or else we’re going to be getting COVID or infected by the coronavirus. At that time, it was the Minister of Justice. We would regularly violate the Minister of Justice’s condition, but not the conditions of nature, you know. It makes a difference.

Stephanie: That’s an interesting lesson that deserves more discussion. It sort of seems like a theme going back to the respect for nature and human values. One of our questions for you as well is whether you participated in any of the work during that transition of the truth and reconciliation processes, and, as a peace activist and as a member of parliament, if you felt that they were effective.

Ela: Well, we drew up the whole law that enabled the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to function. So, I think parliament, it didn’t participate in the working of the commission, but we drew up the laws and the regulations to say how that commission should be working and what they should be doing and that sort of thing, how they go about the work that they do, and what are some of the sectors that need to be taken into account. So, that was something that we did.

We had to do extensive study of other such initiatives in other countries. We weren’t the first ones to put in that kind of a regulation. We had to study others and study what went wrong in some of them, and what worked in some of the initiatives. And then draw up ours. Now in hindsight, we see that ours wasn’t perfect either. There are a lot of things that we omitted from our legislation, like the whole issue of the reparations, of restorative justice — those kinds of issues needed to be better understood and better planned so that communities could benefit from that kind of thing. And communities would accept.

The most important thing, I think, that I learned from being in parliament is that you can make laws, but if the community is not happy about the law and they don’t accept it, then definitely you can just have a lot of violations of the law and the law will be just on paper. The community will be violating it daily. Therefore, the support of the community for every law and every regulation is important. And one can get it, you just have to work hard. You have to go into your constituency and explain why certain things are necessary. People need to understand. People can also tell you why you have to do it this way and not the other way. And then you certainly realize that there is another way of doing the same thing.

So, discussion with the community is very important. In the first five years, I think we had a lot of discussions with communities, both on writing out the new constitution and in the many laws that we passed during that term. But after that, it was a question of delivery where we, I think, hopelessly failed. That’s why we are in a terrible position that South Africa finds itself in at the moment, where the inequality is so high. Unemployment rate is so high. After 25 years, there are people who still don’t have access to basic necessities of life such as water or food, education, health care, housing. I mean, those are things that we should have provided to everyone.

Stephanie: Ela, thank you so much for your time today. I know that you have another event coming up this morning with Stanford University, but Michael Nagler is here in the studio with me and he will be with you on October 1st, so he wants to say hello and ask you a question before you go.

Michael: That is quite correct. Hello, Ela. How are you?

Ela: Very well, thanks. And you?

Michael: Fine, thank you. While we’ve got you in this setting, I’ve been burning to ask you a question. You spoke so well about the economics efficiency that was striven for and mostly achieved at Phoenix, and I’m wondering if we can transfer some of those practices and some of those values from the economic field to the conflict field. The reason I raise this is we have communities in this country which have become dependent on police force for their domestic tranquility, just as the nation as a whole has become dependent on a quite powerful military force for its peace. Was there an implicit escape from that in the experiments that you were doing in Phoenix?

Ela: Yes, absolutely. When I was growing at Phoenix, we had no fences. Our property wasn’t fenced. It was a property that Gandhiji had bought, 100 acres of land. Nobody would violate the borders. But everything was shared. We had a little river. We had a well, underground, a water hole, where people could come and get water. And our neighbors came and, you know, used the water that was on our property. So, there was no kind of ownership of the natural resources. But when we grew vegetables and things like that, nobody would come and steal. They realized that, okay, if you can grow the vegetables, we can also grow on our side of the land. Why do we have to go and steal it from him? And that was the kind of understanding and lifestyle that people lived at that time.

So, we had a beautiful life at Phoenix until the ‘70s and ‘80s when the government began to bring in large numbers of people into the area and changed the farm into housing schemes. And that led to a lot of strife. Ever since then – I mean, Phoenix was burnt down in 1985, instigated by apartheid forces. So, those were some of the limitations that we experienced from the ‘70s and we haven’t been able to return to the more agrarian kind of society. We are trying now, you know, with the community, we’ve built up a good relationship with our neighborhood and we are trying to encourage food gardens and so on.

So, those are small projects that are trying to build up again. But it’s not on the larger scale that Gandhiji had in mind.

Michael: Thank you. Thank you very much, Ela. One last question, I guess, and we don’t have much time, but did Gandhiji and the others consciously carry over the lessons learned, and the values acquired at Phoenix, into the larger social struggles that began in 1906 with the first satyagraha campaign?

Ela: Yes, absolutely. Those values were – and that’s why Tolstoy Farm was built as well in 1910, they acquired a piece of land in Johannesburg and another ashram was developed there. But then Gandhiji himself, after a year at Tolstoy Farm, returned to Phoenix and Tolstoy Farm was closed because there were difficulties. It was very far from the city and Gandhiji had to come back to the Natal province. Those were some of the difficulties which Tolstoy Farms had.

But at Phoenix, the values were taken forward, and many people who lived at Phoenix grew with those values and have taken them into the larger community. It’s not very visible because most Gandhians work quietly. They don’t make a big noise about what they are doing and so on. People don’t hear about them and so we don’t see what is going on worldwide. I think the very fact that you have an ashram there, I think, you know, your founder, Eknathji was definitely influenced by Gandhian ideas.

Stephanie: Yes. And our work at the Metta Center for Nonviolence is also very based in Gandhian values and ideals. And we’re just so grateful to have you on Nonviolence Radio. I’m sorry we’re out of time. I wish that this could go on. For those of you just tuning in, we’ve been speaking with Ela Gandhi all the way from South Africa. Ela, thank you so much for your time today.

Ela: Thank you. And all the best wishes to all of you. The listeners and to yourself, Stephanie and Michaelji. Thank you so much.

Michael: Hello everyone. I’m Michael Nagler with the Nonviolence Report. And today I’m going to do something rather special. I’m going to make a statement about the events of 9/11 which are being remembered around the world. So, 20 years ago, I wrote the pamphlet, Hope or Terror, to point the strange coincidence that on the same date, almost a century earlier, Gandhi had launched satyagraha – nonviolence – at the Empire Jewish Theatre in Johannesburg, South Africa. That was September 11th, 1906. So, I call them, “Signposts for two paths that can be taken by the human race.” Violence or nonviolence. We know what path the world seems to have chosen.

Yet, on the day before he died, Martin Luther King warned a packed church audience in Memphis that the only real choice is “Nonviolence or nonexistence.” And that only becomes clearer with the march of events from then to now.

There are hopeful signs, I’m glad to report. Along with the endless march of war, that the United States has undertaken since 1945, there’s also been a steady global rise of nonviolence – not just as a tool for national liberation, as Gandhi used it, but in seemingly inexhaustible applications to human betterment at every level, from the individual to the global.

It amazes me how nonviolence seems to carry with it a solution for every problem that violence throws across our path. You could ask yourself, “What is terrorism, after all?” An acute sense of separateness from others, right? Leading to alienation from the universe and from oneself. A cry of despair from a heart of helplessness.

Yet there is nothing more empowering that can happen to a human being than to discover the seed of nonviolence hidden within us. As I have found in my limited experience, this discovery – which is inspiring enough in itself, also makes it unmistakable that what we’re discovering is not our private possession. It is the human inheritance. We draw closer to others on a deep level, even as we’re discovering this tool for saying no to their hurtful behavior, we are not negating their humanity.

On the contrary, when we “offer satyagraha,” as Gandhi put it, we are offering the erstwhile opponent a way to stop hurting us (which means to avoid their own moral injury, however little they may be aware of it at first) and break down their alienation. In a word, to rediscover their own dignity in this process. In fact, the word used for ‘nonviolence’ when the Philippine people rose up to expel the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos in 1986 – this is the famous “People Power Revolution.” Their word for nonviolence was, alay dangal, “offering dignity.”

Violence hurts both ways, the perpetrator as well as the victim. Well, nonviolence also operates in both directions, but with the opposite effect: to heal and reconcile, to elevate humanity to that extent every time we use it.

Of course, how to use it isn’t so simple. A lot of subtlety builds around that core simplicity, and a lot of struggle. But one that is worth it. Supremely worth it – not just for ourselves, but for our world, our planet, and our future.

If you’d like to receive ten print copies of this pamphlet, Hope or Terror, please write to info@MettaCenter.org and we can send them to you.

And in December, I will be working with World Beyond War to host a weekly study circle of my latest book, “The Third Harmony: Nonviolence and the New Story of Human Nature.” This study circle will provide an in-depth exploration of nonviolence, how we can cultivate it, and then apply it to solve the deepest crisis facing us today. You can register at WorldBeyondWar.org for those study circles.

With love and hope, thank you for listening. Michael Nagler.

Stephanie: Well, you’ve been listening to Nonviolence Radio. I’m Stephanie Van Hook. Michael Nagler is with me. We want to thank our guest, Ela Gandhi for joining us all the way from South Africa. We want to thank our mother station, KMWR, to Matt Watrous, Annie Hewitt, Bryan Farrell, all of you, our listeners, all the supporters of the Metta Center for Nonviolence, everybody out there, until the next time, let’s practice nonviolence.



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