by Geoffrey Ostergaard
The early 20th century European anarchist-pacifist movement was early influenced by Gandhian nonviolence. Many anarcho-pacifists, such as Ostergaard and Bart de Ligt, found in satyagraha and Gandhi’s social programs the counterpart for the more violent European anarchist strains they were eager to reject. Ostergaard’s distinction between nonviolence as a moral principle and nonviolence as a political strategy seems more relevant now than when he wrote it in the 1980s; more central to debates within the Occupy Movement, and the nonviolent movement in general. This is the second in our series of historical articles that we began with Theodore Paullin’s “Introduction to Nonviolence”. The Editor’s Note at the end of the article presents biographical information about Ostergaard, sources, and credits.
Discussions of nonviolence tend, not unnaturally, to focus on the issue of the supposed merits, efficacy and justification of nonviolence when contrasted with violence. Here, however, I propose to pursue a different track. My object is to explicate the Gandhian concept of nonviolence and this, I think, can best be done, not by contrasting nonviolence with violence but by distinguishing two different kinds of nonviolence. My thesis, in short, is that, Janus-like, nonviolence presents to the world two faces which are often confused with each other but which need to be distinguished if we are to appraise correctly Gandhi’s contribution to the subject.
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by Arne Naess
It was Gandhi’s claim that the greater the efficiency he acquired in the use of nonviolence, the greater the impression nonviolence made on his opponents. This claim he held to be a legacy of his experiences in South Africa. Was he right in this? Did his claim follow, according to inductive principles, as a valid conclusion from what he saw?
The railway-strike episode and others of a similar kind did, in fact, provide Gandhi with an empirical basis for the hypothesis that the more he applied, even to fanatical extremes, the principle of nonviolence, the greater was its effect, and that every increase, no matter how slight, in the purity of the application of the principle meant an increase in the chances of success. Thus we can see what was meant by Gandhi’s seemingly extreme claim that if one man were able to achieve an entirely perfect, nonviolent method, all the opposition in the world would vanish. Yet we must be careful to note that Gandhi explicitly stated that we are all more or less imperfect, not least himself, and that therefore we can talk only in terms of degrees of success and not perfection.
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by William J. Jackson
Gandhi on the Salt March, 1930; public domain photo; photographer unknown
The image of Gandhi in action, walking with a staff in his hand, is well known. We see it in newsreels, statues, films and photos. Thomas Merton described Gandhi as a human question mark. Perhaps we should amend that to “a walking human question mark” moving across the landscape. He was a man on the move, inquiring why injustices exist and how to remedy them.
When Gandhi returned to India after being away for years studying in England and practicing law in South Africa, he tirelessly traveled all over the subcontinent. He went to places where he was invited to resolve conflicts, and was constantly taking the pulse of the people of India, assessing their needs and views, diagnosing the nation’s ills, and, when possible, trying to address them with his legal expertise. During much of this period he traveled by trains in third class cars.
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by Arne Naess
The combination of humility and militancy in emotionally charged social conflicts has always been rare. It is easy to succumb either to passivity or to verbal or nonverbal violence. Humility in confronting a human being, respect for the status of being a human being, whether that being is a torturer or a holy person, is essential.
People may be trained in nonviolent communication through sessions where they confront others with different attitudes and opinions. In schools and universities such sessions in the form of seminars, or otherwise, are easy to schedule. At the university level proposals of norms or principles of nonviolent communication help students to master conflict situations. From 1941 to around 1993, the set of principles formulated in this article has been used by about ninety thousand working in small groups at Norwegian universities. An emotionally charged topic is often selected, and the students asked to discuss it. Or they receive a written dialogue and are asked to analyze violations of the principles that will be outlined below.
Gandhi, the man, his deeds, and his writings have made such a profound impact on millions of people that it is felt all their lives, even if it does not always show up in social conflict activism. People’s veneration is serious and honest, but few have had, or even try to get, training to face opponents or “antagonists” in a Gandhian way.
The way Gandhi at times described the views of people who opposed him and his influence has made a lasting impression. One deed that struck me as glorious belongs to the area of the practice of communication. Instead of giving a broad historical account I shall describe one series of communications.
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by Arne Naess
Gandhi: Merely a Man
We find two diametrically opposed views of Mohandas K. Gandhi’s moral stature. One states that, ethically speaking, he was nearly perfect. Albert Einstein said of him, for instance, that generations to come would scarcely believe that such a man actually walked this earth, and in a collection of essays that appeared under the title Gandhi Memorial Peace Number (Roy 1949), a large number of eminent persons accord Gandhi the highest of praise as a moral being.
We must also ask ourselves, however, what exactly is the nature of Gandhi’s contribution and what is the basis for the tremendous esteem and adulation in which he has been held. For with regard to his own moral achievement, we find a second opinion that is, perhaps, as near the truth as the first: the opinion that Gandhi was often mistaken and that it would be wrong to take him unreservedly as a moral example for everyone.
The best-known representative of this latter and more modest view happens to be Gandhi himself. “I claim no infallibility. I am conscious of having made Himalayan blunders . . .” (quoted in Pyarelal 1932: 133; also in Prabhu and Rao 1967: 9). There are other people also who firmly accept that he fell short of his own very high aims. The best collection of Gandhi’s teaching, The Mind of Mahatma Gandhi, compiled by Ramachandra K. Prabhu and U. R. Rao (1946, revised and enlarged in 1967), opens with two chapters in which Gandhi speaks of his own personal imperfection, his mistakes, their painful consequences, and his unrequited desire for support.
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by Arne Naess
Truth: Absence of Theology: Pragmatic and Agnostic Leanings
Any adequate account of Gandhi’s ethics and strategy of group conflict must take account not only his most general and abstract metaphysical ideas, but also the religious content of his sermons. His basic ideas and attitudes influenced his concrete norms and hypotheses and his conflict praxis. His numerous public prayers were part of his political campaigns, his political campaigns part of his dealings with God.
Gandhi considered himself a Hindu. He gives a condensed characterization of his belief in Hinduism and his relations to other religions in his article “Hinduism”(Young India 6.10.19 21).
Yet, Gandhi found Truth in many religions and faiths, and this explains why his teaching on group conflicts has no definite theological premises. This passage elaborates: “You believe in some principle, clothe it with life, and say it is your God, and you believe in it. . . . I should think it is enough.” (Harijan 17.6.1939).
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by Arne Naess
Introductory Remarks: Aim of the Systematization
Any normative, systematic ethics containing a perfectly general norm against violence will be called an ethics of nonviolence. The content will show variation according to the kind of concept of violence adopted. In order to do justice to the thinking of Gandhi, the term violence must be viewed broadly. It must cover not only open, physical violence but also the injury and psychic terror present when people are subjugated, repressed, coerced, and exploited. Further, it must clearly encompass all those sorts of exploitation that indirectly have personal repercussions that limit the self-realization of others.
The corresponding negative term nonviolence must be viewed very narrowly. It is not enough to abstain from physical violence, not enough to be-have peacefully.
In what follows, we offer a condensed systematic account of the positive ethics and strategy of group struggle, trying to crystallize and make explicit the essentials. We use the adjective positive, because the systematization does not include a treatment of evils, for instance, a classification into greater and less great evils. (Whereas violence is always an evil, it is sometimes a greater evil to run away from responsibility.)
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by Arne Naess
The Contemporary Reaction against Nonviolence
The period spanning the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s witnessed an upsurge of physical violence and a proliferation of recommendations to use manifest violence, physical and verbal. It inundated colonial, racial, and educational controversies in Europe, America, India, and many other areas. Sometimes it has been systematically and consistently anti-Gandhian, being in part a direct reaction against the limited success of Gandhian and pseudo-Gandhian preaching and practice.
We shall not enter here into the controversies about the causes of this development, which we vaguely characterize as the “new violence.” A symptom, rather than a cause, is widespread dissatisfaction, indignation, and impatience when considering the slowness of the movement of liberation in the colonial, racial, and educational spheres. The imperatives “Do it quicker!” and “Freedom now!” testified to this demand for immediate, radical change. The slogan “Revolution!” has invaded all spheres of discussion. Revolution is generally conceived as a violent overthrowing, idealizing “power over” and coercion at the cost of “power to.” Changes should be forced on opponents; agreement and compromise should be shunned. The slogans are sometimes formed consciously so as to be in direct opposition to the preaching of nonviolence.
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Negley FARSON (Special Correspondent for India), The Chicago Daily News:
Bombay, June 21, 1930.
Heroic, bearded Sikhs, several with blood dripping from their mouths, refusing to move or even to draw their ‘kirpans’ (sacred swords) to defend themselves from the shower of lathi blows.
Hindu women and girls dressed in orange robes of sacrifice, flinging themselves on the bridles of horses and imploring mounted police not to strike male Congress volunteers, as they were Hindus themselves.
Stretcher-bearers waiting beside little islands of prostrate unflinching, immovable Satyagrahis, who had flung themselves on the ground grouped about their women upholding the flag of Swaraj (home-rule).
These were the scenes on the Maidan Esplanade, Bombay’s splendid seafront park, where the six-day deadlock between police and Mahatma Gandhi’s followers has broken out in a bewildering brutal and stupid yet heroic spectacle.
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Webb MILLER (Special UP Correspondent for India), The New York World-Telegram, Dharasana Camp, Surat District, Bombay Presidency, May 22, 1930.
Amazing scenes were witnessed yesterday when more than 2,500 Gandhi ‘volunteers’ advanced against the salt pans here in defiance of police regulations. The official government version of the raid, issued today, stated that ‘from Congress sources it is estimated 170 sustained injuries, but only three or four were seriously hurt.’
About noon yesterday I visited the temporary hospital in the Congress camp and counted more than 200 injured lying in rows on the ground. I verified by personal observation that they were suffering injuries. Today even the British owned newspapers give the total number at 320 …
The scene at Dharasana during the raid was astonishing and baffling to the Western mind accustomed to see violence met by violence, to expect a blow to be returned and a fight result. During the morning I saw and heard hundreds of blows inflicted by the police, but saw not a single blow returned by the volunteers. So far as I could observe the volunteers implicitly obeyed Gandhi’s creed of non-violence. In no case did I see a volunteer even raise an arm to deflect the blows from lathis. There were no outcries from the beaten Swarajists, only groans after they had submitted to their beating.
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