The Power of a Different Kind

Once, at an impromptu seminar with a group of journalists in San Francisco, a colleague turned to me and asked, "OK, what is violence?" I shot back, "A failure of imagination."

While I'm still not entirely sure what I meant, I think I was groping toward an insight that a beloved mystic of modern India, Swami Ramdas, expressed perfectly: "Ignorance is the cause of all quarrel and strife in the world. Ignorance is not a crime. It does not deserve to be condemned, but it has to be removed. And by the power of your love, you can remove ignorance."

This seems to me to sum up the nature of violence in a nutshell—and direct us toward its prevention. If I don't have the imagination to realize that you and I are one, despite our physical separateness and the differences in our outlooks on life, what's to prevent me from using violence if I think you're getting in my way? You might almost say that there's a kind of violence already being done in that very failure to see that we're one—violence to the truth.

But ignorance can be cured. Failures of imagination can be reversed. Love plays some kind of role in both these processes.

To look at violence as a kind of ignorance helps immediately to see wisdom and love as the solution. And this is where we begin to glimpse something remarkable: that there is a force available to human beings that operates entirely differently from coercion, threat, or punishment.

Gandhi expressed this with characteristic directness: "Power is of two kinds. One is obtained by fear of punishment, and the other by acts of love. Power based on love is a thousand times more effective and permanent than the one derived from fear of punishment."

This is the reality that our culture has largely overlooked. It's fairly common knowledge now that peace is more than the absence of war. But it's just as essential to understand that nonviolence is more than the absence of physical violence. In both cases we would be trying to understand a light by studying its shadow. It is time to turn around and see what's casting it.

The ancient Sanskrit term ahimsa, which we translate as "nonviolence," actually suggests something profoundly positive that would not be possible to name directly. In Sanskrit, abstract nouns often name a fundamental positive quality indirectly, by negating its opposite. Thus courage is conveyed by abhaya, which literally means "non-fear"; the Buddha's avera, "non-hatred," means "love." The reason ancient India's great thinkers expressed themselves in this apparently oblique way is that phenomena like love, absolute courage, and compassion are primordial things that cannot be fully expressed in fallible, conditioned human language.

So what does this force actually do?

Gandhi gave one of the most insightful descriptions ever made: "What Satyagraha does is not to suppress reason but to free it from inertia and to establish its sovereignty over prejudice, hatred, and other baser passions. In other words, if one may paradoxically put it, it does not enslave, it compels reason to be free."

This is the kind of education we dream of, where the student doesn't just learn some facts, doesn't just learn how to put facts together, but awakens to a new realization. It is more a growth experience than just acquiring knowledge, and after this kind of learning one does not go back to sleep.

Real nonviolence rarely has a backlash, because it does not operate by coercion. It operates by persuasion—often a kind of deep persuasion that moves people below the conscious level. Since the opponents have changed willingly, they are not looking for an opportunity to get back at us. When this force works, it doesn't just change one party's position; it changes the relationship between parties. Once people have "seen" the situation from a new point of view, those who once were opponents move closer in spirit.

As Hannah Arendt observed, "The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is to a more violent world." Acts of coercion produce equal and opposite reactions. But integrative power—the power that draws people together through appeal to their higher nature—produces transformation rather than mere compliance.

Consider how Gandhi himself discovered this force. On that fateful night of May 31, 1893, when he was thrown off a train in South Africa because of his race, Gandhi was furious. But instead of taking the insult personally, he saw in it the whole tragedy of humanity's inhumanity—not "they can't do this to me," but "how can we do this to one another?"

Already at that period he believed that people could not stay blind to the truth forever. He did not yet know how to wake them up; he just knew they could not want to stay forever asleep. That is how he was able to find a third way between running home in defeat and lashing out in anger. He launched what was to become the greatest experiment in social change in the modern world.

The important thing to remember is this: whatever model we use to think about human potential, whatever we believe we are, will tend very strongly to be self-fulfilling. Not to know that nonviolence is possible, or to think that it's only the province of a few hard-pressed activists, is to be resigned to ever-increasing violence—and therefore condemned to endure it without remission.

But to know that nonviolence is possible, to know that it's not a non-something but a force grounded in nature and exampled in history, is to begin getting our culture back on course.

Fires start, but fires also go out. Scientists concerned with aggression have totally ignored the means by which the flames of aggression are extinguished. We know a great deal about the causes of hostile behavior, yet we know little of the way conflicts are avoided—or how, when they do occur, relationships are afterward repaired and normalized. As a result, people tend to believe that violence is more integral to human nature than peace.

Gandhi made a simple but profound observation: "The fact that there are so many men still alive in the world shows that it is based not on the force of arms but on the force of truth or love. Little quarrels of millions of families in their daily lives disappear before the exercise of this force. Hundreds of nations live in peace. History does not and cannot take note of this fact. History is really a record of the interruption of the even working of the force of love or the soul."

This force, for which love seems to be a reasonable term, is always there in human consciousness. It is unfortunate that, particularly in times like ours, we find it so hard to see that force beneath the surface of events.

But that is changing. And we can be part of that change—because nonviolence is not about what we refrain from doing. It is about what we choose to become.