Professor Michael Nagler and others at the Metta Center have a working definition of nonviolence:
Nonviolence is a powerful method to harmonize relationships among people (and all living things) for the establishment of justice and the ultimate well-being of all parties. It draws its power from awareness of the profound truth to which the wisdom traditions of all cultures, science, and common experience bear witness: that all life is one.
The challenging and interesting notion is that all life is one.
Not many people think like that, or that the widespread awareness among many people has been suppressed by the dominant modes of thought. Most of us still live in a Newtonian World in which his expressed assumptions, one way in which Newton demonstrated his greatness, in which the world is seen in terms of solid separate material bodies, and that is all there is, whereas light is all around us unless we are blind or benighted. Energy and consciousness are a challenge to our understanding, and now it turns out to our existence.
Climate change is an expression of this problem, which is not just a question of market economics, institutions or organizations, or legislation but more fundamentally, as Michael Nagler, suggests our culture. History can be seen as the story of culture and cultural change.
Can nonviolence work when confronted with violence? This is the question that confronts the Tibetan resistance to heavy handed reaction of the Chinese Government which includes a willingness to use overt violence, structural and cultural violence against the Tibetan people. The same deck of cards has been used against the Palestinian people by the precursors to the Israeli State, for example the Stern Gang, and by the systematic machinations of the Israeli State. In these cases it is often tempting to use asymmetrical violence in response. Both Islam and Christianity both have just war theories.
Meanwhile in Iraq in particular, and Afghanistan the exercise of unrestrained, brutal, and criminal violence by an occupation military is demonstrating that violence is purely destructive, and as others have observed the irony that its purpose is to secure the hydro-carbon resources that will add to the greenhouse effect.
Sometimes, frogs lay their eggs in the pools we have around the house. We feed them, and the water with time becomes polluted so the tadpoles cannot live. So I change the water. But that does not work. Now the answer, which we found from the newspaper, is to transport them the nearest creek. While this does not guarantee their survival it gives them a chance of life. The moral is as simple as the story. When as I was sweeping up leaves, I came along a frog who croaked, and I seemed to understand what was said.
