 onviolence
assumes conflict is inevitable because change is inevitable, and
with change comes conflict. If there has been a traditional view
of seeing pacifists as "peaceful" (overlooking the fact
we usually cause a good deal of trouble, being non-conformists by
nature), Gandhian philosophy assumes that the "reality"
we see is transitory, that change and struggle is the rule, not
the exception.
This view of the world is very old - Heraclitus, (the Greek
philosopher who lived about 535-475 B.C.) taught there was no
permanent reality except the reality of change - illustrated by
his maxim "You cannot step twice in the same river".
This is also, in many ways, the essence of Marxism - everything we
observe is in a state of change. It may help if we think of the
world "of reality" as if it were water in the process of
becoming either steam or ice - no change seems to be taking place
until, suddenly, there is a great change. (Remember how the
institution of Jim Crow suddenly cracked beginning in December,
1955, in Montgomery, Alabama).
For Gandhi, as a Hindu, this was an easy assumption, since for
Hinduism all the reality we see is an illusion, covering a deeper,
changeless, unknowable reality. In thinking of Gandhi we should
understand the role of the Bhagavad-Gita (meaning "Song of
God") in his life and thinking. The Gita is very old -
perhaps the 5th to 2nd century B.C. It is relatively short - the
paperback copy I have is just 140 pages. (Printed in 1954, a
"Mentor Book by the New American Library" its pages
brown and fragile, proof of the instability of matter!). The most
poplar work in Hindu religious scripture, it was as well known to
Gandhi as the Gospels would be to a devout Christian.
I want to quote one passage which concerns a great battle in
which Arunja, the warrior, is about to take part. As he looks on
the scene of what is to become a bloody battlefield he turns to
Lord Krishna, an incarnation of God, and says:
 rishna,
Krishna, / Now as I look on / These my kinsmen / Arrayed for
battle, / My limbs are weakened, / My mouth is parching, / My body
trembles, / My hair stands upright, / My skin seems burning, / The
bow Gandiva / Slips from my hand, / My brain is whirling / Round
and round, / I can stand no longer: / Krishna, I see such / Omens
of evil! / What can we hope from / This killing of kinsmen? / What
do I want with / Victory, empire, / Or their enjoyment? / O
[Krishna], / How can I care for / Power or pleasure, / My own
life, even, / When all these others, / Teachers, fathers, /
Grandfathers, uncles, / Sons and brothers, / Husbands of sisters,
/ Grandsons and cousins, / For whose sake only / I could enjoy
them / Stand here ready / To risk blood and wealth / In war
against us?
"Knower of all things, / Though they should slay me / How
could I harm them? / I cannot wish it: / Never, never, / Not
though it won me / The throne of the three worlds / How much the
less for / Earthly lordship! / Krishna, hearing / The prayers of
all men, / Tell me how can / We hope to be happy / Slaying the
sons / of Dhritarashtra? / Evil they may be, / Worst of the
wicked, / Yet if we kill them / Our sin is greater, / How could we
dare spill / The blood that unites us? / Where is joy in / The
killing of kinsmen? / What is this crime / I am planning, O
Krishna? / Murder most hateful, / Murder of brothers! / Am I
indeed / So greedy for greatness? / Rather than this / Let the
evil children / of Dhritarashtra / Come with their weapons /
Against me in battle: / I shall not struggle, / I shall not strike
them. / Now let them kill me, / That will be better."
Khrisna responds, explaining that since Arunja is a warrior the
battle is his duty - "If you refuse to fight this righteous
war, you will be turning aside from your duty. You will be a
sinner and disgraced. . . . The warrior-chiefs will believe it was
fear that drove you from the battle."
rishna
goes on to spell out for Arunja the path of "Karma Yoga"
which is the "yoga of action". (We are familiar with
yoga as a form of exercise - in Hinduism there are various forms
of the discipline of yoga - one is "Karma Yoga", which
is seeking unity with God through good actions, rather than
meditation. Gandhi, if we are to understand him, must be seen as a
Hindu who took the path of Karma Yoga).
For orthodox Hindus, the text of the Gita is hardly an
invocation to nonviolence. On the contrary it seems an apologia
for doing one's military duty. But Gandhi, unorthodox in so many
ways, was unorthodox here, as well, and saw nonviolence - the path
of loving resistance, of "soul force" or Satygraha - as
the way out of the pain of engaging in the slaughter of his
brothers. Yes, he would accept his duty as if he were in the
warrior caste, but he would transform the very nature of battle
itself.
I have drastically condensed what should be read whole - if the
translation by Swami Prabhavananda & Christopher Isherwood is
still available, it is much worth reading [Eds. Note: It is and
you can buy
it here via Amazon.Com]. One can't grasp the philosophy of
nonviolence as Gandhi developed it without looking at this source.
For Gandhi, the hope was that if each conflict could be
resolved through nonviolence, the next conflict would occur at a
"higher level" - an echo, arrived at by a Hindu, of
Marx's thought that the dialectic would lead to positive change.
In practical terms there is not much difference between Marx's
"material dialectic" and Gandhi's thought, though one
was rooted in the rejection of religion and other rooted in it.
For Marx, all history was the process of a "material
dialectic" between the human race in conflict with its
environment, with the cultures that emerged from that conflict
reflecting it - thus, the "Gods" of nomadic tribes were
different from the "Gods" of early city life. The
concept of God evolves from that of the Torah, in which the God of
the Jews was one of many Gods - but the only one the Jews should
worship - to the God spoken of by Jesus, who was one, and
universal. Of course, primary to Marx's thought was that social
structures reflected the power of those who owned the means of
production.
 here
is one remarkable line from the Gita that is central to
nonviolence: "Of all the world's wonders, which is the most
wonderful? . . . That no man, though he sees others dying all
around him, believes that he himself will die."
Death is a given. Our own life is supremely important to us -
our only experience of consciousness - yet we must come to terms
with its inevitable end. At least for those of us who are
atheists, there is no afterlife. Part of what makes nonviolence so
powerful is its respect for the unique nature of every person. Not
one of us has existed before, or will exist again. Each of us
contains a kind of "private universe" of experience. It
is good to live, good to experience life, good to enjoy that
experience, good to rejoice in the wonders of life. All the more
urgent, if we are here but once, and briefly, to feel entitled to
experience the delights.
It is this extraordinary uniqueness of being that makes the
pacifist so absolutely unwilling to destroy another person, for
with each death a universe ends, and can never be replaced. How
wonderfully we are made, how different from one another. To
respect and understand the uniqueness of each person may make it
possible also to sense what we have in common, even if what we
have in common is only the certainty of our own end. Yet we must
be reconciled with the fact that we must die. What we do not
have to do is kill - that alone is our choice.
We come in different sizes, shapes, sexes, colors, each of us
bearing different cultural and family memories. Nonviolence is
about a society in which, far from having people conform to some
standard, each person is able to realize, during his or her life,
their greatest potential.
 et
. . . it is certain that at some point our life must end. To enjoy
life it is, oddly, necessary to realize the dimension death gives
it. If we were to live forever, each day would be of less value -
our days being endless. (Just as a person with only a single ten
dollar bill values it far more highly than the person who has a
room jammed full of them ). It is precisely the "finite
nature" of our chance to experience life that makes it so
wonderful. And it is our willingness not to be
"attached" to the material world, to realize death will
take from us all we have, that gives daily life its savor. The
popular saying "He who dies with the most toys wins"
sums up the wrong position - what can a dead man do with his toys?
How much more joyous if we say "The one who has given away
his toys before the deadline wins". I remember Bayard Rustin
once remarking that whatever clothes you had in your closet that
you had not worn in the past year no longer belong to you -
clearly you didn't need them, and must give them to someone who
did. The Christian Gospels contain a parable about the rich man
who had gathered great wealth to insure his security and God says
"You fool! Tonight you will die - what good will your riches
do you?".
So . . . nonviolence is a philosophy based on the assumption of
change, and on the realization that change will cause pain and
injustice. It is an effort to deal with that one certainty of
existence - nothing remains stable. (Think of Gimbels, Woolworth's
and the Soviet Union!).
More seriously think of the Industrial Revolution, with its
monstrous suffering (if you compare the horror of Stalin's short
time in power and the millions who died under him as Russia
industrialized with the agony of the century and more of the
Industrial Revolution, the suffering is not so different - only
the time frame). The struggle against racism in which good people
find themselves trapped by old concepts. Think of the struggles of
labor, where union organizing often divided families - the old
union song "Which side are you on?". Nonviolence means
an effort "to do battle with injustice" without risking
the destruction of our opponents, both because we cannot be
absolutely certain we are right (dealt with in Part One), and
because those we oppose are as unique as we ourselves.
Part of the philosophy of nonviolence has to confront the issue
of "non-attachment" to materialism and also even to life
- a paradox, because we place so high a value on life. And, in the
next issue, I want to take up the paradox of how, to achieve
justice we have to accept injustice.
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