It's nice to be here! :-)
The strength of a revolutionary paradigm is largely determined by the views and attitudes of its revolutionaries. Therefore any change that you wish to see you first have to exemplify in your own life. This does not mean that you have to be perfect! It isn’t about perfection but it is about aiming high. True, authentic and lasting revolution requires sacrifice and discipline. Of course anyone can quote Gandhi but what does it really mean to be the change that you wish to see in the world?
Paradoxically, one of the first important things to realize is that it isn’t about you, the revolutionary. It isn’t about your glory, it isn’t about being right, it isn’t about your vengeance and it isn’t about any kind of reward for you on the other side of the tunnel. It’s about creating change in the world that does more good for more people. That’s it. The first thing is to get your ego out of the way!
Violence is not the best way and it certainly is not the only way. Consider for a moment the United States’ Global War on Terror. We have rounded up and killed several terrorists but have we made the world any safer? If I were a twelve year old boy in Iraq watching foreign soldiers take away my father, I would probably be mad as hell. I’d probably carry that with me and swear to avenge. We may have taken down several leaders and members of current terrorist movement but how many of the next generation have we created in the process?
A violent revolution contains within it the seed of the next violent revolution. It is a cycle that never ends. If you destroy one violent system and replace it with another violent system then you haven’t really changed anything at all. It’s just the same old thing, repackaged. Creative solutions have to take the place of violent solutions. I find the Civil Rights movement and Gandhi’s revolution in India to be great examples of such solutions. Instead of using violence, both movements used mass civil disobedience to create change. Again, you have to get your ego out of the way, and you have to be willing to sacrifice for a cause that you believe in. Both violence and mass civil disobedience can shake a population out of apathy, but the later has far fewer consequences.
It is much easier to find creative, nonviolent solutions if you can give up on the religion of materialism. By this I mean the common belief that material reality is the absolute reality. And it isn’t absolute reality, any quantum physicist can tell you. What appears solid to us is simply molecules and atoms vibrating at speeds so fast that our nervous system can’t perceive it. It gives the perception of a solid reality, but perception is deception. Remember that people used to perceive that the Earth was flat or that the color of one’s skin mattered.
Giving up the religion of materialism mostly amounts to realizing that stuff doesn’t make one happy. This realization is a revolution in and of itself. How many of the world’s problems could be solved if people really, truly and deeply understood this one thing? So many problems have their root in the religion of materialism, think of any problem and you can point out how and where. Undoing those knots would be let a river of creative solutions flow. Waking up from this illusion might change the fact that one percent of the population of the United States holds ninety-five percent of the nation’s wealth, resulting in a rapidly disappearing middle class. Waking up from this illusion might help us see that we don’t have to be so hyper-competitive as a nation, obsessed with the profit margin to such an extent that we outsource jobs and fight wars to secure energy so that the game can continue. But these realizations on a large scale are far, far away, if ever.
For us as individuals, giving up on materialism simply means realizing that having that new iPhone isn’t really going to make us more content. It might for a few days, but there will always be another, newer, iPhone. We don’t have to play ‘Keeping Up With The Johnsons’ (or the Kardashians, whatever). Happiness and contentment does come from helping other people, from finding ways to do more good for more people. And that’s the whole idea of revolution in the first place anyway, right?
Being selfless, nonviolent and nonmaterialistic are three ways that I believe people interested in true revolution can start to make a vision become a reality. A revolutionary paradigm is the expression of its revolutionaries on a large scale. I hardly expect anyone reading this to fully buy in to everything I’ve said here, but I hope to at least make you think about it. Thank you for reading.
hey drew, nice to meet you! i like what you've said here. i completely agree with your take on materialist culture and the necessary ego-weening required of successful revolution. and i think there's much we can learn from gandhi and mlk et. al. about organized and effective resistance. at the same time, though, i'm a little nervous about turning "non-violence" into a kind of religious dogma. it can work really well in certain circumstances, and it can also fail spectacularly (as it did in s. africa with ghandi's son). likewise, there are plenty of examples of violent strategies that have worked without the complications you mention (cuba, nicaragua....). i don't mind talking about non-violence as a potential strategy but when it's turned into a moral absolute--when it condemns more aggressive efforts uncritically--i get turned off. che guevera is a problematic figure in some aspects, but i agree with his sentiment that violence can be as loving an act as non-violence--as "egoless", in other words. i think it's wrong to ever tell an abused person that defending their interests via violence is wrong. self defense isn't wrong, and almost all bottom up violence is self-defense in my view. there might be a higher road, (you might tell the woman being raped that she should just endure her suffering and not use the gun in her hand that would instantly end the abuse), but it's wrong to condemn violence out of hand, without considering the circumstances.
ReplyDeletein short, i agree with two of your three premises about "true revolution". and i think that one of your premises--being egoless--might actually REQUIRE violence in certain circumstances. if it were me, i would replace non-violence with "willingness to take risks". those risks can sometimes be non-violent and sometimes the reverse.
also, would you add "organized" to your list? i just read an article about how exceptionally well organized mlk's sit-ins were. we think of them as spontaneous actions--just taking a seat at the front of the bus or at a whites-only cafe, but it turns out those were highly planned out events. i had no idea.
hopefully we can chat more about this on saturday. i look forward to meeting you in person!
It's true that even Thich Nhat Hanh has been fearless in his willingness to take risks. I mention this because he adheres to a doctrine of Peace and because I have been struggling in my own mind what real revolution looks like. It seems that in order to make change we have to shake things up. Minds have to be blown. Heads have to be turned, knocked off and rolling down the street. If people are not flabergasted or knocked to some sort of sense (or the floor), it seems that the level of apathy might outweigh any action. We need a resounding WAKETHEFUCKUP call (!), but does it have to be a blast? Can it be subtler than that?
ReplyDeleteI have talked with a few people over the last couple months about this, too, and I am often told that if there is no bloodshed, then no change will come. This bothers me because while I understand the anger and the need to create action, I aim to be non-violent. Also, we are inundated with images of violence everyday. It seems to take more and more to infiltrate our levels of desensitization. Violence is the norm on TV, in music, in the media....and on and on.
I really like the idea of replacing "non-violence" with "willingness to take risks." If I move back to my readings of Thich Nhat Hanh's words, I see that despite his practice of non-violence, violence occurred all around him. He was there during the Vietnam war. He was a peaceful activist, helping those in need and speaking out against the war. For this willingness to take action, he has been through more than I can imagine and quite possibly could handle. He has seen, in a very brutal way, friends and colleagues destroyed. He has also been barred from returning to his home because of what he speaks. He and the people he worked with indeed took many risks and I am sure are still taking many risks right now and all for world-+wide social change. Still, he speaks and acts in peace.
One of the things I love about Thich Nhat Hanh is the way he talks about anger. He says that we should start with ourselves and learn how to deal with our anger in such a way that we understand it and treat it as a needy child that needs nurturing -- not in a fire feeds fire kind of way but in an understanding equals compassion kind of way. With understanding and compassion comes real healing. It seems like a back door tactic, subtle, and unsuspected. Everyone expects a fight. The logical next step for me is applying that action of understanding to others. Understanding where others are coming from and then clicking the switch so that healing (revolution) can occur, rings very clearly and true for me.
ReplyDeleteDespite the heinous things Thich Nhat Hanh has seen, he has stuck to his doctrine of peace. I find this highly admirable. Highly! I find it even more admirable that the language he speaks really seems to make changes. I know that what I have read so far has changed a lot in the way I think. Anger is not to be soused, by any means. It is to be recognized and understood. After the recognition and understanding comes a very well informed set of actions.
Another thing I want to add, and Drew and I talked about this a bit, is the need for education (and maybe some more non-traditional, i.e. grassroots, kinds of education is what I speak of here). From time to time I work with an organizaiton called Art from Ashes. The organization goes into rooms where there are very broken people and uses poetry therapy to help empower those who were otherwise devalued in very deep ways. The other night I went in to a workshop as a reader. I read some of my poems and worked in the workshop with the youth there. I remember a look a couple of them gave me. I shared some pretty deep stuff, just like they did and at the beginning of the workshop I had a list of stats that may have otherwise felt out of reach for some of them (I also realized I had been taking those stats for granted, feeling that they really didn't mean much in the grand scheme of things). After the workshop was done and I received those looks, I realized that education really is key. "Look, if I can do it you can do it, too," is what this workshop demonstrates, "You can do anything and you are valuable, and we will prove this to you here. Hold on to that!"
We build rapport, trust, empower others and then take action with those skills and pay all of that forward to the next round of folks who need this kind of healing. I think revolution starts there. We can't just rile people up without the knowledge (and I am not saying that's what anyone else is saying, it's just where my meandering mind has led me just now).
Excellent points about self-defense. In Tai Chi I learned a lot about the need to be able to take care of oneself, to self defend. This is where I struggle. I want to be non-violent but the point is there. If you are coming at me with intent to kill, I have to do my best to protect myself. . . .
For now, I have to end. My computer at the library is about to time out. I hope we continue this conversation. I look forward to it very much.
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ReplyDeleteRegarding nonviolence and absolutes... I agree that a violent response is appropriate in some situations, but nonviolence is the position to strive for unless there are no other options left. You can't have absolute nonviolence because it is absolutely true that there are no absolutes! My passion for nonviolence is a response to my anger about the unchecked violent actions taken by our military around the world. The USA is drunk with military power.
ReplyDeleteSireneatspoetry (great moniker btw!). I like much of what you've said here, especially about anger being something that needs to be acknowledged, not repressed, but without letting it smother you. Have you read Sonny's Blues? I think that story speaks to the issue of passion on a broader level, about needing to feel, even to suffer, but with enough distance that it doesn't drown you. Art can facilitate that process, I think, as can Buddhism, but it seems to me that too often the Buddhist path is practiced as a repression of one's passions, which leads to the worst and most unforgivable kinds of apathy. It negates any kind of risk whatsoever and becomes pure escapism. Art can of course be used in the same way. They're both double-edged swords.
ReplyDeleteDrew, I think I see what you're saying. And I agree with you that when revolutionary violence is practiced it usually models the systemic violence that we're all victims of--and becomes regressive. But, as you point out, sometimes that isn't the case, and it's important not to view "non-violence" as a moral principle in itself. Rather, as I think you're saying, it can be a means by which we demonstrate moral principles--a means (among many) of securing the type of moral world we'd like to live in. In other words, it's a tactic, a methodology, but the means, in this scenario, don't always justify the ends. Put another way, if you can achieve the exact same results using non-violence as you can using violence, then the non-violent method is preferable. I agree with that.
Brilliant points, Shane! Thank you! I will find that book. I have not read it. I think I need to!
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