Theory

PURPOSE: Gandhian nonviolence or ahimsa has its origins in Vedic Hinduism and in the 6th century BC Jain philosophy of “doing no harm” to living things. Jainism was a popular sect in the Indian state of Gujarat where Gandhi was born and raised. Gandhi did not like the word nonviolence, sometimes written as non-violence, which might be said to compound the misunderstanding. A better reading of ahimsa might be not-violence, admittedly awkward, but nonetheless conveying the sense that nonviolence is all that which does not belong to the category of violence, rather than its opposite. A satyagrahi needs to cultivate virtues, habits, and practices that are nonviolent; paramount are patience, forgiveness, and satyagraha or holding to the truth. Gandhi spoke of nonviolence as a way of life and virtue, in part as a counter-reaction to Rabindranath Tagore’s injunction that nonviolence could be used for good or evil. Those who would practice nonviolence must make themselves nonviolent to forestall its misuse. This section of our web site hopes to engage these sorts of definitions, discussions, and the effect of interpretation on current practices. Your contributions are welcomed. The Theory page is edited by Joseph Geraci.

Gandhian Sarvodaya and Anarchism

Posted March 10th, 2013 in Constructive Programme, Gandhi, Theory

by Geoffrey Ostergaard

“In the ideal state every one is his own ruler. He rules himself in such a manner that he is never a hindrance to his neighbour. In such a state, therefore, there is no political power because there is no State.” M. Gandhi  (Young India, 2 July 1931)

The practical difference between socialism and anarchism, at the purely local level, is small. They differ, of course, in how each responds to the question of a state and national policy. Gandhi saw an India with a plethora of local problems, and for them he prescribed local solutions. In this respect, his thinking and philosophy most closely resemble Western anarchism than any other political philosophy. In fact, he acknowledges Tolstoy, especially his spiritual anarchist treatise The Kingdom of God Is Within You, as an influence. But Gandhi’s political thought is not derivative, it originally combines his Hinduism and his thoughts on non-violence. Nevertheless, many concepts familiar to the student of Western anarchism are also present in the philosophy of Sarvodaya.

Read the rest of this entry »

Lok Sevak Sangh: The Servants of the People

Posted February 21st, 2013 in Gandhi, Theory

by Mohandas K. Gandhi

Gandhi, c.1948; public domain image, courtesy commons.wikimedia.org; photographer unknown.

After Indian independence, Gandhi advocated the dissolution of the main political party, the Indian National Congress, which he had previously led. The struggle had shifted, he said, from securing independence to seeing to the needs of the people. Party politics could not serve this purpose and so he conceived of more localized structures to be called Lok Sevak Sangh, or the Servants of the People. Just weeks before his assassination, Gandhi drafted a constitution for Lok Sevak Sangh, which Geoffrey Ostergaard refers to in his article also posted today. Lok Sevak Sangh has not been given enough attention, but bears comparison with anarcho-syndicalism, the Muslim Brotherhood’s social program, or the current emphasis of the Occupy Movement on social programs. The draft constitution was published on 15 January 1948. Two weeks later, on 30 January, Gandhi was assassinated.

 

The Draft Constitution:

Though split into two, India having attained political independence through means devised by the Indian National Congress, the Congress in its present shape and form, i.e., as a propaganda vehicle and Parliamentary machine, has outlived its use. India has still to attain social, moral and economic independence in terms of its villages as distinguished from its cities and towns.

The struggle for the ascendancy of civil over military power is bound to take place in India’s progress towards its democratic goal. It must be kept out of unhealthy competition with political parties and communal bodies. For these and other similar reasons, the AICC resolves to disband the existing Congress organization and flower into Lok Sevak Sangh, the Servants of the People, under the following rules with power to alter them as occasion may demand.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Interconnectedness of Violence

Posted February 11th, 2013 in Natural World, Theory

by Winin Pereira and Jeremy Seabrook

Most people connect violence solely with a physical action against other human beings, but ancient Indian sages perceived it in a much wider sense. They considered all life sacred, and in their concern for self-perfection, the killing of any living being, human or non-human, was sinful. Further, causing harm to other creatures was also thought wrong; it had to be minimised because harm itself was considered a form of partial death. Harm was defined widely to include not only physical injury, but also all forms of pain, including depriving persons of their livelihood or intimidating them. Violence could be committed personally, it could he instigated or aided, or it could be condoned by observing it without protest. [1] However, it is not possible to survive in this world without at least some violence, for we depend on other living beings for our food. Avoiding all killing must result in our own death.

Our sages were deeply concerned that humans must necessarily be involved in violence and death and that absolute innocence was unattainable. They understood the concept of ahimsa to mean the minimum or least possible violence. While causing some harm is inevitable, we do not have a licence to kill other creatures ruthlessly, to act on the basis of the “survival of the fittest”, which in effect means survival of the most violent. Rather, we should have greater respect for those beings whose lives must be sacrificed in order that we may survive. The survival of the fittest means that the rest perish. Social justice is incompatible with this theory.

Read the rest of this entry »

Lenin and Gandhi

Posted February 11th, 2013 in Arne Naess Project, Gandhi, Natural World, Theory

by Arne Naess

Some of Gandhi’s fellow-workers, just as some of Nehru’s in a later day, were Socialists and Marxists. Though critical of their views, Gandhi was far from negatively disposed toward their aims. He believed, however, that it could not be in the employer’s interests to behave badly toward the workers, and that the employer could be persuaded to make radical reforms. On the basis of psychological and social interests common to both sides, he believed it impossible, in the long run, for one group to profit at the expense of the other. Exploitation and oppression amounted to violence, in Gandhi’s terms, and could only drive participants apart.

Today we might well admit that the acceptance of Gandhi’s view could have spared us Lenin’s uncritical acceptance of means and also the kind of laissez-faire liberalism we find in Western Europe, a liberalism which rejects all measures of economic control to remedy the undeserved suffering of the poor. We have seen in our time how both of the political philosophies from which these economic views are derived have led to violence and oppression.

Read the rest of this entry »

Interview: Why Nicholson Baker is a Pacifist

Posted January 25th, 2013 in Book Review & Literature, Interviews, Pacifism, Theory

by Nathan Schneider

Nicholson Baker; public domain photograph; courtesy of Wikipedia.com

Anyone who makes even a modest habit of speaking out against war in public soon runs up against the inevitable, supposedly unanswerable question: What about World War II? It’s meant to be the ultimate stumper. This was the “good war,” wasn’t it, the war waged by the “greatest generation” against the evil incarnate of Hitler and imperial Japan? There was simply no other choice before the forces of goodness and truth but to leap into the single most deadly undertaking in all of human history. Right?

That won’t work if you’re talking to Nicholson Baker. In an extraordinary cover story in Harper’s Magazine, “Why I’m a Pacifist: The Dangerous Myth of the Good War,” Baker explains how learning about World War II was actually a big part of what made him a pacifist in the first place. “In fact,” he writes, “the more I learn about the war, the more I understand that the pacifists were the only ones, during a time of catastrophic violence, who repeatedly put forward proposals that had any chance of saving a threatened people. They weren’t naïve, they weren’t unrealistic—they were psychologically acute realists.”

Read the rest of this entry »

On Nonviolence and Literature

Posted January 16th, 2013 in Book Review & Literature, Theory, Tolstoy

by Lawrence Rosenwald

For most of my life, reading literature has given me some of my most intense and purest experiences.  I know from these experiences what Nabokov means when he writes, “ . . . a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm” (316-7); what Kafka means when he writes, “a book must be the axe for the frozen seas within us”; what Emily Dickinson means when she writes, “if I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry” (NA I: 2483). A society that sought to deprive readers of such experiences, that sought to keep writers from creating works in relation to which such experiences might be found, would seem to me cold and impoverished – the frozen seas would remain within us, with no axe to break them up.

More recently, I have also become intensely committed to nonviolence – to nonviolence in relation to national conflict, i.e., to pacifism, but also to nonviolence as a way of life.[1]  I am a modestly obedient citizen in most spheres of public life; in this one, I have become a deliberate and assertive lawbreaker.  For the past sixteen years, when my wife, Cynthia Schwan, and I have paid our federal income tax, we have subtracted from what we owe (though I don’t believe that “owe” is the right word for our relation to the government in this matter) the percentage of the federal budget that goes towards current military expenses, sent the subtracted percentage to progressive organizations or a progressive escrow fund, and informed the IRS of the action that we have taken.  This is, as noted, illegal, and the IRS has accordingly seized the money we have refused to pay, either from our bank accounts or from my salary at the college.  I do this annual act of civil disobedience because, just as I refuse to endorse a world without literature as I might imagine it, so I refuse, with equal intensity, to endorse the violent world I actually inhabit, the world of East Timor and Rwanda and Bosnia and the sanctions on Iraq, and in particular the violent country I inhabit, with its military budget that is by far the largest in the world, greater than the military budget of the twelve next largest military budgets combined.

Read the rest of this entry »

Deep Ecology for the 22nd Century

Posted January 5th, 2013 in Arne Naess Project, Natural World, Theory

by Arne Naess

This is not my title! Why did my friends insist on that title? Because of many conversations of this kind:

NN: Are you an optimist or a pessimist?
AN: An optimist!
NN: (Astonished) Really?
AN: Yes, a convinced optimist; that is, when it comes to the twenty-second century.
NN: You mean of course the twenty-first?
AN: No, I mean the twenty-second; the life of the grandchildren of our grandchildren! Are you not interested in the world of those children?
NN: In other words, we can relax because we have a lot of time available to overcome the ecological crisis?
AN: Not at all; every week counts. How terrible and shamefully bad conditions will be in the twenty-first century, or how far down we have to start on the way up, depends on what you, and others do today and tomorrow. There is not a single day to be lost. We need the highest levels of activism immediately.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Nonviolence of Health & Healing: The Satyagraha Foundation Interview with Dr. Richard Hoofs

Posted December 6th, 2012 in Interviews, Theory

by Joseph Geraci

  


“Grow Healthy,” South Berkeley California mural;
by Youth Spirit Artworks; photo by Ariel Messman-Rucker;
courtesy of Street Spirit.

Satyagraha Foundation (SF): In your book, Prescription for Self-Healing (“Zelfgenezing op doktersrecept”) you refer to the ancient Greek, Hippocratic origins of western medicine and the principle, that “the action of healing must avoid harm.” The Gandhian term for nonviolence, ahimsa, can be translated as, “Do no harm”. Can we also speak of ahimsa as a principle for healing?

Richard Hoofs (HOOFS): Absolutely we can apply ahimsa to healing. The first principle for a doctor or health practitioner is not to harm the patient. Every doctor swears an oath to this. The word heal, in fact, comes from the root to make whole, or to become one again, and by this I mean to reconnect with the source, to the light within. To reconnect with this source and light within is a sacred event. It is healing.

Read the rest of this entry »

Guest Editorial: Nonviolence and the New Self

Posted November 25th, 2012 in Guest Editorials, Religion, Theory

by John David Muyskens

A commercial on TV shows a fierce looking man who says, “Why we fight is like asking why leaves fall. It is just our nature.” And that seems to be the nature of many people. But we can gain another nature.

We seem to be wired to try violence as a way to deal with violence. But violence only leads to more violence. If we can learn the art of love we will be able to get along so much better. We have a tendency to rush to judgment about people. We so quickly think ourselves better than others. But in reality we are all in the boat of life together.

One way to gain a loving nature is a form of contemplative prayer, called “Centering Prayer,” engaging us in silent, communion with God. In contemplation, we enter a presence rather than asking for anything. We accept the way things are. Centering Prayer changes us because for the moment we lose control. We are quiet. We let God give us whatever God wants to give. Not what we expect but what God gives. We give our consent to God’s presence and action in us. It is not a matter of doing but of being.

Read the rest of this entry »

Guest Editorial: Love is winning, but it can always use some help

Posted November 25th, 2012 in Gandhi, Guest Editorials, Theory

by Simon Moyle

Those who attempt to work for social change, especially in terms of peace work, are no strangers to despair. The task can seem so great, and our efforts so small, that victories seem impossible, the problems insurmountable. People’s attitudes take forever to change, if they change at all. Malevolent forces seem to have all the power, the weapons, the resources, the inertia, the media, and even the culture captive. Many refuse even to begin the work for this reason.

Gandhi also noted this fact in his book Hind Swaraj (or Indian Home Rule) in a section I think it is worth quoting at some length. In it he explains why he believes that the force of “love” (which he says “is the same as the force of the soul or truth”) is the greatest power in history:

“The fact that there are so many still alive in the world shows that it (satyagraha) is not based on the force of arms but on the force of truth or love. Therefore, the greatest and most unimpeachable evidence of the success of this force is to be found in the fact that, in spite of the wars in the world, it still lives on. Thousands, indeed tens of thousands, depend for their existence on a very active working of this force. Little quarrels of millions of families in their 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 every interruption of the even working of this force of love or of the soul…History, then, is a record of an interruption of the course of nature. Soul-force, being natural, is not noted in history.”

Read the rest of this entry »

« Older articles
Newer articles »
hrule
“When planted in the garden, the mustard seed, smallest of all the seeds, became a large tree, and birds came and made their home there.” Luke 13:19

“For me whatever is in the atoms and molecules is in the universe. I believe in the saying that what is in the microcosm of one’s self is reflected in the macrocosm.” M. Gandhi