First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis

How Not to Plant the Seeds of Violence

The world is a precarious place, and life is uncertain. This has always been true; the evolution of the human race has been a chancy proposition from the beginning, and we are the creatures we are because of the incessant need to outwit the elements and the competition that has shaped us for survival. Even in today’s world, when the chances of running into – or should I say away from? – a saber-toothed tiger are slim, we can still be incapacitated by microscopic viral predators, or tossed about at random by winds and floods and fires, despite all our best efforts to control things.

Millennia ago, our genes began experimenting with a novel strategy for ensuring their survival through our species in the face of all this danger and uncertainty. The options for being faster, or stronger, or more ferocious or more prolific had already been taken, so they placed their bet on a two-pronged policy; we would be creative, and cooperative. We would have little in the way of sophisticated instinctual instruction; we would have to figure things out for ourselves, learn as we grow – that way, when circumstances changed, we could adapt quickly, and survive in a variety of environments. But smart and innovative alone wasn’t going to do it; the other half of the equation was that we would work together – share, take care of each other, pass along useful information, help with endeavors that no one of us could manage alone. Now there is still something to be said for fast, and strong, and prolific, and even ferocious – a lot to be said for it, sometimes, when clever and gregarious isn’t working out so well – and the genes kept those fall-back strategies; they just weren’t our trademark.

This tactic, as we know, has been spectacularly effective. Innovation and cooperation together have trumped just about every other survival strategy in play, and our genes have had unprecedented success in spreading across the surface of the planet and adapting it to us as much or more as we have adapted to it. Besides the overwhelming forces of the earth itself, and a handful of tiny parasites that use our own physiology against us, the only threat to our comfortable dominion is – ourselves. For the genes neglected to specify who was supposed to be ‘us’ and ‘not us’, and human beings have been struggling since the dawn of consciousness to figure that one out. One of the ways that cooperation works is through common enemies; a threat from outside the group triggers the work-together, protect-each-other impulse in the human genetic heritage. But frustratingly, that threat can take the form of a tsunami or a wild fire or a charging mastodon, or it can take the form of another bunch of humans, who have a different king, or a different language, or a different religion, or stars on their bellies, and the triggered response is pretty much the same. And so through the course of history, human beings have been quite innovative in figuring out ways to gang up on one another, and make other human beings miserable. We have been unable to decide in practice whether others of our kind should be regarded as kin, or as the competition.

I say in practice because we seem to keep discovering, philosophically, in principle, that things would work better for all of us if we would go for the kinship option. Cooperation, after all, is part of what evolution designed us for, and when we work together, it’s quite amazing what we have accomplished – and probably could yet accomplish. But we never quite manage to stay there entirely; somehow, the balance always tips us back into fear and violence. Some of the world’s great minds have struggled with this conundrum; how can humanity use its adaptive creativity to stay in cooperation with one another, and stop reverting into conflict and mutual destruction? It is a question that has always been urgent, and now that our cleverness has achieved the capacity to annihilate the planet, it is a question of survival.

As with most crucial questions, there are two easy answers, that don’t work. We know, because historically both of them have been tried. Both are versions of what Matt Ridley calls "the naturalistic fallacy; which is to argue that what is natural is moral." The first is the counsel of despair, which says that human beings are by nature inherently nasty creatures, who must be restrained from doing what they always wish to do, that is, take selfish advantage of each other while creating as much havoc and suffering as possible. One version has it that only some form of divine intervention can change people at their evil hearts. The more materialistic view says that laws and customs must by threat and force prevent us from indulging our impulses, and as soon as any one person gains power in any form, they will use it to oppress others. The trouble with this unpleasant view is that it often becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, and while it accounts for some observed human behavior, there is also a great deal about us that it misses completely.

The other side of the fallacy is the equally unhelpful counsel of perfection, which would have it that what human beings ought to be, they really are, if only they were released from the corruptions of history and culture. The romantic ideal of the noble savage suggests that it is the pressures of civilization and the power of tyrants that make people behave badly, whereas when we are free, we are spontaneously honest, generous, responsible and gentle toward others. If our society were structured properly, this view maintains, there would be no need for violence, and therefore none would occur. Bad archeology has from time to time suggested that such cultures did or do exist, but closer examination has always found human nature to be much the same mixed bag that we ourselves experience. As attractive as it is to think that we are what we wish we were, there is no evidence that the mere absence of constraint enhances either justice or compassion in the human condition.

The world is precarious, and so is human character. Because we are neither angels nor demons, we are confronted with a task, which is to understand the ambiguity of our nature, and create ways of enhancing its most constructive aspects, while acknowledging our less helpful impulses, and minimizing their impact. This is the resolution to which many of the most insightful spiritual leaders have come, including the famous advocate for non-violence, Mohandas Gandhi. The virtue of satyagraha, the force of truth, is to help human beings to become aware of themselves, and in that awareness to choose non-violence in relating to others. Like many other spiritual proposals, this sounds good in theory, but it’s true power lies in the practice when it is challenged. Gandhi’s ethic of non-violence seeks to maintain our connection to the cooperative aspect of human nature, even in the face of oppression and suffering, for that is when it is most needed, and most difficult. It is in the moment when one chooses to suffer, rather than to inflict violence, that satyagraha has its most dramatic impact, and it is for this witness to colonial power in India that the Mahatma is widely remembered. However, the practice of truth force is larger than these historical confrontations; it is also a discipline of daily life and ordinary society, which seeks to minimize the occasions for conflict to arise, and to cultivate truthful and just relationships among people.

As part of instructing his grandson about non-violence, Gandhi gave young Arun a list of what he called blunders, that he said were forms of ‘passive violence.’ As long as these errors were present in a society, said the Mahatma, oppression and injustice would continue to arise. The practice of satyagraha would work to eliminate these tendencies, so that the balance might more readily tilt toward the side of self-awareness, mutuality, and non-violence. In contemplating these descriptions of what makes for a world of suffering and violence, notice that human nature is neither despised nor romanticized; what is most necessary is clear-sightedness about our condition. These things, said Gandhi, are mistakes:

Wealth Without Work

Pleasure Without Conscience

Knowledge Without Character

Business Without Ethics

Science Without Humanity

Religion Without Sacrifice

Politics Without Principle

and Arun made his own contribution to the list, adding Rights without Responsibilities.

Let us unpack each of these notions a little, and see what guidance they might offer us. In each case, they represent an element of human experience, particularly in community, that has been seen at times both as an unconditional good, and also as an inherent evil. Gandhi proposes that they are neither the one nor the other, but rather precarious goods that can easily become destructive, if they lose their balancing constraints. Wealth is good, he suggests, as long as it is earned. What people have acquired through their own efforts they usually value more realistically, not making it more important than the contribution to the common good that it represents, nor so trivial that it can be thoughtlessly wasted. Wealth without work tends to make people feel entitled to other advantages that they have not earned; power and status for example. In addition, wealth that is simply received often dampens creativity and the urge to make a difference in the world. Wealth in itself can offer both security, and the opportunity to be generous, but those who enjoy it, if they wish to practice truth, self-realization, and non-violence, must be careful still to do their share of the common tasks of humanity. To use wealth to escape from work is to set the stage for oppression of others, and that is to plant the seeds of violence.

Pleasure without conscience evokes the heedlessness that does not consider how one’s own behavior may impact others. In our sex-obsessed culture, it may be promiscuity and exploitation in sexuality that first comes to mind, and certainly this is an arena in which any person, male or female, straight or gay, can make irresponsible choices that are deeply damaging. Still, it is not only the sexual pleasures that may be indulged without conscience. Any form of consumption that uncontrolled leads to addiction, or any pleasure that depends upon someone else’s unwilling sacrifice of time, effort, or dignity, is without conscience, and sows the seeds that may ripen into future violence.

Knowledge without character suggests that you can know a great deal, but if you use that knowledge without integrity, then the deepest learning has failed. Character integrates facts about the way the world works an understanding of what matters; truth has to do not only with correct information, but also with personal and intellectual honesty, and the willingness to stand up for truth even when doing so is unpopular and difficult. A person of character can admit mistakes and make amends, and is always open to being proven wrong by new information. There are too many learned people who are also petty-minded and mean-spirited. To use knowledge to manipulate or intimidate others makes that knowledge, which is a good thing in itself, into a tool of oppression, and corrupts the purpose of learning. This helps to plant the seeds of ignorance, which are also seeds of violence.

Business without ethics can sound like a tautology in the age of Enron, Worldcom, and Halliburton, yet to dismiss all enterprise as somehow unethical is to condemn an essential element of our human connections. As long as each of us is more gifted at certain activities than at others, one of our evolutionary advantages of cooperation is the opportunity for me to exchange what I do well for what someone else does better than I do. When that trade is honest and voluntary, everyone benefits. Such exchanges work best in an environment of trust, and trust is sustained only fair dealing. Thus when a business person behaves unethically, it injures not just his or her own enterprise, but poisons the confidence of the whole marketplace. To conduct business without ethical principles is to exploit the trust of others, and in such exploitation the seeds of violence are planted.

Science without humanity makes the powerful tool of the scientific method into an end in itself, and encourages us to think that anything we can do, we should do just because we can. The values of our humanity suggest that there are some experiments which, while interesting, entail too much pain to be worthwhile; and that some questions, while perhaps not as intellectually engaging, are more urgent in terms of their application to the real needs of people. Science that loses touch with the sense of wonder, and the humility of engaging an awe-inspiring universe, becomes mechanical and destructive. The truly dedicated scientist understands him or herself to be an interpreter of truth to their fellow human beings, in order to share the sense of discovery and delight. When science becomes detached from its humanity, it becomes willing to torture and murder in order to dissect, and then it is a fertile seedbed for violence.

Gandhi considered himself a practicing Hindu, but he also said that there is no religion higher than righteousness. By religion, or worship, without sacrifice, he meant the futility of rituals and prayers when the believer is unwilling to change his or her life, to sacrifice pride, greed, and selfishness in the service of becoming a better person. Religion that concerns itself more with dogmas and beliefs than with service to others and inner spiritual growth becomes dangerous, and we certainly see the evidence of this all around us today. For Gandhi, whatever religion you may espouse, it calls you to action, to do things you may not always like, and to give up self-indulgence, self-righteousness and controlling the outcome of everything you do. These disciplines inevitably call for the sacrifice of our inclinations – not burnt offerings, or gifts of money to the church, but patience, compassion, and cheerful duty are the true sacrifices, and without these, religion is just another way of dividing people up, and one of the most difficult seeds of violence to eradicate.

Last on his list was politics without principle, and here, too, we see the justice of his caution in our own public arena. When the object of political life ceases to be the hope of serving the common good, and becomes merely winning the next election, then the corruption of power sets in. Principle in politics means both standing for a particular viewpoint and set of values, rather than advocating whatever position the latest polls indicate is popular, as well as participating in the process responsibly, not smearing one’s opponent, not selling one’s vote to special interests, not using one’s position for personal gain. Civic involvement can be a path toward making the world a better place, a part of a person’s calling to be of service to others, but only if it is pursued with integrity. Done with principle, politics is a high art. Without that, it is another form of exploitation, and only serves to nurture the seeds of future violence.

Gandhi’s little grandson, Arun, later added his own thought to the list, one which corresponded very exactly with the Mahatma’s ideas. Rights without responsibilities, he said; when people feel that they are entitled to the regard of others, but have no obligations to those others, resistance becomes almost inevitable, and that resistance is often confrontational. Those who care more about fulfilling their responsibilities than about claiming their rights help to secure everyone’s rights, including their own; for rights cannot flourish where people do not embrace their responsibilities. Indeed, to say that someone has a right, is pretty much the same as saying that someone else has a responsibility to honor or fulfill that right; all our rights collectively depend upon our mutual responsibilities, and to seek the one without the other is to sow the seeds of violence.

‘Passive violence’ is what Gandhi called them – wealth without work, pleasure without conscience, knowledge without character, religion without sacrifice, business without ethics, science without humanity, politics without principle, and rights without responsibilities. What all of these have in common is the necessity for trust; if we do not live in such a way that we can count on each other, take each other’s word, be assured of one another’s good will, then the seeds of violence are already planted, and the crop will be ripe sooner than we can imagine. In order not to do that, we must create, as Matt Ridley suggests, a social order predicated on our inclination toward cooperation. We must seek, not the perfect harmony and virtue of the morally unambiguous creatures that we like to imagine we are, but can never really be for very long; rather, we must build institutions that foster our two great gifts from the genes – our creativity, and our ability to cooperate. Speaking personally, I’m not holding out for perfection in my society; that would require some wholey different type of creature than the ones we have to work with now. But I do think that we could do better than we have yet; I do think that where we plant trust, guarded with conscience, character, humanity, and principle, the seeds of violence are less able to flourish.

To live with satyagraha, the force of truth, is a continuing challenge. It is a challenge to respond to suffering and oppression with the non-violent witness for justice that changes the way we think about the world. It is also a challenge to live from day to day in honesty and trusting community, in a collective integrity that will not enable the seeds of violence to be planted among us. It is difficult to say which of these challenges is larger; it requires great strength to answer violence with non-violence. But it also requires a patient, focused discipline to cultivate a life that nurtures a society in which violence does not arise to begin with. It is a precarious path, just as life is a precarious enterprise, and there are never any guarantees. But we are clever creatures, after all; our fate is not written into our genes, and we are designed to go about this together. The true triumph of intelligence and cooperation would be for humanity to cease threatening itself; to learn to put into everyday practice the understanding that we are brothers and sisters, not perfect, but all on the same side. If it is true that trust is the foundation of virtue, it seems to me also that virtue is the foundation of peace. No other creature has come as far on this path as we have; may we find the courage, the creativity, and the commitment to follow it all the way, to learn the love that casts out fear, to bind up the wounds of violence, and to live together at last in good will and peace.

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Thanksgiving Reflection

The holiday season is upon us, and the Thanksgiving weekend draws to a close. But before we are enticed by the lures of yuletide, let us pause and consider for one more moment the deeper meanings of this present holiday, which calls us less to myth than to the realities of nature and of history.

There is always the innocent thanksgiving of nature’s bounty and human industry, and it becomes us indeed to consider at least once in the year how astonishing is the plenty that we take for granted every day. I read of a family whose Thanksgiving traditions grew out of their farming heritage, when it was the custom at the Thanksgiving table to sample a taste of everything that they had canned and preserved from the summer’s harvest, to see them through the winter. This awareness of how we are nourished by the earth, through the work and skills of many hands, is worth contemplating once again in gratitude. May it also renew our care for this precious planet, whose resources, while generous, are not infinite; so that we fulfill our role as stewards, and do not require of it more than it can sustainably supply.

There is also the Thanksgiving of memory, when we recall the journey of the English pilgrims who arrived as exiles in a land strange to them, seeking the opportunity to build a community of religious integrity together. It was a project compounded of desperation, idealism, and self-righteousness, and it might easily have ended in disaster. But with the hospitality they received from those they would later call savages, and with their own sheer courage, faith, and commitment to one another, they nursed the sick, mourned the dead, built their shelters, and coaxed a scant crop from the rocky New England soil. Along with the corn and beans, they sowed the seeds that would flower into a new nation’s experiment in democracy; in spite of themselves, they nurtured a larger vision of liberty than they started with. What they began, we have inherited; it is a legacy not without ambiguity, but it is worth remembering what was best in them – their hopes, their sacrifices, their vision of a community of justice, truth, and peace.

That vision, of course, was never fully realized in the society those ancestors created. There is always, necessarily, also the Thanksgiving of repentance, when we acknowledge the impact that the arrival of European settlers was to have on the indigenous residents of this continent. In 1970, Frank Wamsutta James, a member of the Wampanoag tribe, was invited to participate in a celebration of the 350^th anniversary of the Pilgrim’s landing at Plymouth Rock. After reviewing his planned speech, the officials in charge of the event refused to let him participate. This is an excerpt of what he would have said:

The reality of this history must be a part of any Thanksgiving that is to have integrity today. All the past is laced with ambiguity and confusion, much like the present. What we remember, we can learn from; what is hidden always poisons us in ways we do not understand. If we are to be grateful only for perfection, we shall live forever dissatisfied. Let us rather give thanks for life in all its brokenness; for hopes, even when they are disappointed, for visions, even when we fail to reach them. And let us take to heart the lessons of the past, that we may celebrate its gift without reenacting its failures. Then our gratitude may lead us into the lives we have aspired to live, and the world we have longed to build. Let us read together the antiphonal response which is printed in your orders of service.

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Reading from The Origins of Virtue by Matt Ridley

Our minds have been built by selfish genes, but they have been built to be social, trustworthy, and cooperative. That is the paradox. Human beings have social instincts. They come into the world equipped with predispositions to learn how to cooperate, to discriminate the trustworthy from the treacherous, to commit themselves to be trustworthy, to earn good reputations, to exchange goods and information, and to divide labor. In this we are on our own. No other species has been so far down this evolutionary path before us, for no species has built a truly integrated society except among the inbred relatives of a large family such as an ant colony. We owe our success as a species to our social instincts; they have enabled us to reap undreamt benefits from the division of labor for our masters – the genes. They are responsible for the rapid expansion of our brains in the past two million years and thence for our inventiveness. Our societies and minds evolved together, each reinforcing trends in the other.

But self-congratulation is premature. We has as many darker as lighter instincts. The tendency of human societies to fragment into competing groups has left us with minds all too ready to adopt prejudices and pursue genocidal feuds. Also, though we may have within our heads the capacity to form a functioning society, we patently fail to use it properly. Our societies are torn by war, violence, theft, dissension and inequality. We struggle to understand why, variously apportioning blame to nature, nurture, government, greed, or gods.

Trust is as vital a form of social capital as money is a form of actual capital. Knowing how evolution arrived at the human capacity for social trust, we can surely find out how to cure its lack. Which human institutions generate trust, and which ones dissipate it?

For St. Augustine, the source of social order lay in the teachings of Christ. For Hobbes it lay in the sovereign. For Rousseau it lay in solitude. For Lenin it lay in the party. They were all wrong. The roots of social order are in our heads, where we possess the instinctive capacities for creating not a perfectly harmonious and virtuous society, but a better one than we have at present. We must build our institutions in such a way that they draw out those instincts. Pre-eminently this means the encouragement of exchange between equals. Just as trade between countries is the best recipe for friendship between them, so exchange between enfranchised and empowered individuals is the best recipe for cooperation. We must encourage social and material exchange between equals, for that is the raw material of trust, and trust is the foundation of virtue.

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from Conflict Resolution and Gandhian Ethics by Thomas Weber

Gandhi believed that to a large degree individuals were masters of their own destiny, that they could transcend their social conditioning and that biological and psychological forces acting upon them did not leave them a machine that acted its life out according to a set plan. Most of all, however, Gandhi was convinced that people were not innately violent. The Gandhian individual has choice. This choice includes the ability to attempt the resolution of conflicts by nonviolent cooperative means even where this is not the background mode of operation within the social structure to which the person belongs. More than that, ways of behaving -- that go towards making the nonviolent action that satyagraha depends upon second nature -- can also be learned.

Although Gandhi placed the individual at the center of his moral thought as a free acting being, he strongly stressed that the nature of human nature was one of cooperation rather than individualism. In order to fulfill their nature the individual had to exercise their individualism for the good of all, and this included working towards the reformation and reorientation of society to enable a greater scope for the self-realization of all individuals. Because of this relationship the converse was also true:

Gandhi's ethics, therefore, stems not from the intellectually deductive formula "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" (or its variant, "Do not do to others what you would not have them do to you"), but on the statement of faith that "what in fact you do to others, you also do to yourself". This belief in the possibility of changing and perfecting the self, a possibility open equally to all, means that for him the choice of an individual is a choice for mankind because the self and mankind are ultimately one . Gandhi's approach to conflicts is, therefore, a major part of the quest for self-realization, because:

(1) Self-realization presupposes a search for truth.

(2) In the last analysis mankind is one.

(3) Violence against oneself makes complete self-realization impossible.

(4) Violence against another is violence against the self.

(5) Violence against another makes complete self-realization impossible.

While the striving after nonviolence may be difficult, it "is the only permanent thing in life,... [and] is the only thing that counts…[therefore] whatever effort you bestow on mastering it is well spent". The key to the attainment of nonviolence is courage.