A conversation with Michael Nagler

A veteran of the peace movement explores the meaning of nonviolence, the response to September 11, and the purpose of education
By Russell Schoch

According to the founder of Berkeley's Peace and Conflict Studies program, this is the best of times and the worst of times for a movement toward peace. The worst, says Michael Nagler, because when people are afraid, as many are after September 11, the last thing they want is change; the best because a growing number of people around the world are sensing that violence is not the answer to the world's ills and may, in fact, be the cause. With his new book, Is There No Other Way? The Search for a Nonviolent Future (Berkeley Hills Books), and his current position as chair of PACS, Nagler has been interviewed frequently since September 11, as often as six times in a single day.

Nagler came to Berkeley in 1960 as a graduate student in the new department of comparative literature. Already a "peacenik" upon his arrival, he was deeply involved in the Free Speech Movement and took part in various efforts to reform the educational system. (One indication of the changes that have taken place during Nagler's career: In 1962, he was stopped by a Daily Cal reporter who asked why he was wearing a beard.) After earning his master's and Ph.D. degrees, in 1966 he became a regular faculty member, splitting his time between classics and comp lit.

A key moment in Nagler's life took place in 1967, when he met a visiting scholar, Sri Eknath Easwaran, who was teaching meditation. He became Nagler's mentor and the leader of an ashram in West Marin, founded in 1970, where Nagler still lives. Nagler found that being an intellectual was not the only way--perhaps not always the best way--to answer life's most important questions. Studying and meditating under Easwaran also led to Nagler's lifelong interest in the work and thought of Mahatma Gandhi.

Gandhi's teachings, he says, enabled him to harmonize his spiritual and political yearnings. "For me, nonviolence was the bridge between spirituality and the desire for political justice," Nagler says. "Nonviolence has been my central focus as a thinking person ever since." He was amazed that there was no course on Gandhi at Berkeley, and set about to teach one. It was from that course that Peace and Conflict Studies emerged in the early 1970s.

Nagler was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1937. He imbibed a love of teaching at the dinner table, where his parents, both teachers, eagerly discussed their students every night. "Their love of children and of teaching got into me pretty deep," he says. Television did not enter his home until he was a teenager and, as an adult, he has never owned a set. In high school, Nagler joined the bohemian crowd, playing bluegrass mandolin with various folk music groups in Greenwich Village. (He remembers looking down on a young folk singer from Minnesota named Bobby Zimmerman, who has just released his 43rd album under the more familiar name of Bob Dylan.)

Nagler first studied Greek at Cornell University and fell in love. "I am a literary animal," he says. "Reading poetry, especially in difficult languages like Greek [and later Latin and Sanskrit] was the high point of education for me." He has written a book on oral poetry in Homer ("a folk singer like me"), and several articles on violence in the Odyssey. In conversation, he often cites his beloved classics; his analogy for September 11 is not Pearl Harbor, but the Sack of Rome.

In 1991, Nagler retired early from his position in classics and comparative literature. He was discouraged by what he calls the increasing corporatization of the University--"treating and organizing education as a business." But he has continued to teach in PACS and still gives a course on meditation.

                What is nonviolence?

                Nonviolence, which is grounded in the worth and                 dignity of every human being, really arises from the                 struggle within a person to overcome potentially destructive drives like anger and fear. The results of this struggle are what I call the moral architecture for social justice and world peace.

Since the work of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., it's been estimated that nearly one-third of the world's people have practiced some form of nonviolence for the redress of grievances. This is the concept of "people power." The idea is that the power of an aroused populace is greater than the power of the state, since the state depends on the consent and the cooperation of its citizens. And when citizens rise up, as they notoriously did in the Philippines twice in recent memory, the state is powerless to stop them. But people power is only the tip of the iceberg. The real nonviolence, in my understanding, is person power. That is, the power of the single individual. That power can be multiplied by numbers, on demand; but unless it comes from an individual, an individual's commitment, it's not there. When it is there, once you develop a nonviolent energy, you can use it in any direction.

Can you explain how this works?

I'll give you an example of nonviolence from the top: Sir William Penn ran a colony, soon to become the State of Pennsylvania, along Quaker lines. This is sometimes called the "holy experiment." Penn was in complete charge of the territory, of both the Europeans and the Indians, and in all cases he dealt with people along nonviolent lines. It went on successfully for some 70 years, and contributed to the character of American government.

And look at Gandhi's career. As we know, he was the leader of an insurrectionary movement against an established authority. That's people power--using nonviolence to influence people who have power over you. But he also urged his people, Hindus, to deal fairly with Muslims; that's horizontal. Finally, he wanted it very much to be operated downwards toward the outcast Hindus, whom he renamed the harijans or "children of God." So he was using nonviolence in all three social directions: to those "above," to those in a parallel situation, and to those "below."

You can then talk about nonviolence between husband and wife, between oneself and one's co-workers. The applications are quite limitless.

You show in your book that nonviolence has a history most of us are unaware of.

Yes. In 1909, Ghandhi wrote that what we call "history" is designed not to recognize or document nonviolence. In fact, what history documents are breakdowns in the social system. Gandhi was trying to make nothing more nor less than a breakthrough in the history of consciousness, to show that nonviolent force has kept humanity alive for countless generations.

What's the difference between nonviolence and pacifism?

When you're distant from something and you don't hear about it very much--nonviolence--you tend to equate it with something you know a little about, which is pacifism. There's a bit of overlap between nonviolence and pacifism, but there's a very important difference.

The way we usually define pacifism is in a negative way: "I will not participate in . . ." usually a war. Whereas the real, principled nonviolence position starts from a positive: "How can I make a creative, constructive, long-term impact on the situation I'm in and, ultimately, on the world I'm in?"

What does your three decades of involvement with nonviolence suggest should be our response to September 11?

In the first place, terrorism cannot be condoned--least of all by those of us who favor nonviolence. But it can be understood. There are reasons we were attacked that day, and may be again. While the actions of the September 11 attackers were deplorable, and while al Qaeda and its fundamentalist supporters are religious extremists, they represent only the extreme edge of a widespread resentment against our nation's policies and attitudes. To understand these things is not weakness; it's wisdom. To think, as the New York Times encourages us to do, that these are irrational fanatics who envy us because we are prosperous and democratic is a dangerous puerility.

Unfortunately, those of us who did not want a military, retaliatory response failed, and our effort was doomed to fail.

Why?

Because bombing is the default response--it's packaged, ready to go.

So what I said to my community is: Let's dig in now for the long haul. This is what my class in nonviolence has been working on; this gives my students a very, very vivid sense of relevance, because this could be the most important thing we've ever done. I told my students that what we should be calling for is some sort of modest gesture of recognition of other people's suffering.

For example?

I told them the story of John F. Kennedy's speech at the American University in Washington, in which he cited the suffering of the Soviet people during World War II. He talked about the bravery with which they fought back against Nazism.

That might seem like "so what?" to us, but no American President before or since has ever publicly acknowledged that the Russian people suffered during World War II. Ordinary Soviet citizens were walking around with copies of the speech folded up in their wallets. It was electrifying for them! What I proposed to my students was this: If we had wanted to end the Cold War, we could have done it right then. We had opened a door; all we had to do was walk through it. But, we probably didn't want to end the Cold War; and we probably didn't even know we had opened that door.

What could be said today to ease tensions?

If we could make some sort of gesture of acknowledgment--not to the terrorists, not to al Qaeda, but to the Arab world: "We recognize that we have made some mistakes, and there is a lot of suffering going on, and that we've had a role in this suffering. We're concerned about this; let's work together to redress it." That's all we would have to say, and this would completely change the atmosphere.

"We" being the administration?

Yes. This would have to be done at a high level. That human outreach would take the wind out of the sails of the terrorists.

The U.S. government is wrong in thinking that force will deter them. And wrong in thinking that nothing else will. So that's the first point we in the peace community want to make to the American people. The challenge is to acknowledge that suffering has been imposed on the Arab world and to acknowledge that we had a role in imposing it.

But what about our security?

Violence does not bring security; if history teaches anything, it teaches us that. If we succeed in "eliminating" Osama bin Laden, others will take his place. But if we eliminate the grievances that the Third World, and in particular the people of the Mideast, have against us, why should they hate us? Security comes from well-ordered human relationships; it does not come from bomb-sniffing dogs and high-tech spy satellites.

Every time we have pursued violence to further our interests in other countries--supporting Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, and the Taliban--it has rebounded to harm us--what the CIA calls "blowback." If we truly want to be secure, we must understand why we're hated and take steps to correct it.

What steps do you suggest?

There are three areas. In policy, we have to look particularly at our behavior in Israel-Palestine, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia, where we have supported the autocracy since 1943. In lifestyle, we cannot go on consuming global resources, particularly oil, at an unsustainable rate. Bike to work! A third area is in our culture. Since commercial television became available in 1946, we have created a culture of violence. We cannot possibly expect to escape violence unless we change that culture. Intuitively, there is a close connection between the cultivation of violent imagery--in movies, in television, on the "news"--and the experience of more and more violence in the real world--a connection which scientific studies have confirmed repeatedly. And that culture of violence has led to a politics of cruelty.

I'm reminded of a friend of mine, a former diplomat under President Carter, who resigned from the diplomatic corps because of what he called the "radical disconnect" between the basic decency of the American people and the frequent cruelty of the policies carried out in their name. Now that this cruelty is coming back to be visited upon us, the American people, it is time for every one of us to start making changes in lifestyle, in cultural participation--entertainment and "news" choices--and in political decisions.

But if we were to do nothing, how would that help?

I'm not talking about doing nothing, and I'm not even saying we shouldn't fight back. I'm saying instead that we should not fight back with the same weapons the attackers used: violence. The choice between violence and doing nothing is a false choice; it shows an extreme poverty of imagination.

How can one reason with terrorists?

The same way you reason with non-terrorists: by respecting their humanity and listening to their complaints; that opens the dialogue. We have done the exact opposite: stigmatized them as fanatics at best, and "varmints" at worst. This makes understanding impossible.

So what do you recommend?

In the short term, we in the nonviolence community recommend treating the September 11 attack as what it is--an international crime. That means turning it over to international mechanisms for appropriate punishment. The U.S. can make its intelligence services available to the international authority, and even its armed forces, if matters come down to a forcible extradition. We do not recommend bombing at a distance--which is taking the role of judge, jury, and executioner into our own hands and visiting punishment on a whole population.

How does one become nonviolent?

What I've come to believe, as I mentioned earlier, is that nonviolence begins with the struggle of an individual with his or her own negative state and then converting it into its corresponding positive. Let's say something happens and you get angry. You "want" to lash out. If you do, you will be doing violence. And if you swallow the anger and run away, you will also be doing violence.

To yourself?

Yes. And you're also reinforcing the other person's anger. But if you struggle with that anger, and treat it not so much as the emotion--anger--but as a raw energy, and you find a way to express it as work, as a creative intervention in the situation, then that is nonviolence. I give the example in my book of my teacher, when he was infuriated at the cramped quarters of a caged bear in India; while my teacher's friend was threatening to get a gun and kill the bear's owner, my teacher rushed around to provide for a bigger cage for the bear. A nonviolent solution.

Why would people decide to take such a step?

Because on some level they have an inkling that the world is not a "win-lose" place, and that they are not separate from other people. And if you use violence toward others, for whatever reason--however much it may be justified--you will be hurting yourself.

We sometimes hear that violence is built in, that there's a biological basis for it.

No, there is not. That's an old myth. Twenty top behaviorists gathered under U.N. auspices to produce a document in 1983, the Declaration of Seville, which exploded the false science that had been used to suggest that there's a biological, and therefore inevitable, basis for violence.

Behaviorist Frans de Waal--who's not a nonviolence advocate, just a good scientist who knows what he sees--describes a very poignant moment of observing chimpanzees in the Arnhem Zoo [in Holland] reconciling after a quarrel. He wondered what the literature had to say about this. And of course he found nothing. There were reams and reams about how chimps get into fights, but nothing about how they get out of them. It's just not something that is studied.

Why is violence so accepted today?

Because most people are critically uneducated about the major issues that face humanity in the 21st century. I believe, with Gandhi, King, and others that the choice between violence and nonviolence is the most important choice facing every person and society today.

Not realizing this, and lacking crucial information about the world, is what makes it possible for very decent people who do not kick their dogs or beat their wives to come up with nothing but "Bomb them!" when they've been hurt. And to fail to respond when they hear that 5,000 children a month--roughly the number who died in New York on September 11--are dying in Iraq as a result of U.S.-imposed policies.

A friend of mine has a radio talk show in Sonoma. She was talking about Iraq, and a man called in, absolutely furious. "What are you talking about?" he said. "We haven't done anything in Iraq." She quietly pointed out that we bombed their water system, on which they absolutely depend, causing people to boil sewer water to drink, and that 5,000 children a month are dying from preventable diseases.

The man asked, "Where are you getting those figures?" She replied: "That figure comes from UNICEF." And he said: "Oh.. . .my. . .God." He just stopped in his tracks. He had not known this.

Your point is that ignorance--

It's a form of ignorance. Lack of information. Now, mind you, it's slightly willed ignorance. By which I mean that when people start to see these facts, they intuit where those facts are going, and this creates cognitive dissonance. And the next thing you know, that fact isn't there, or it's argued away.

What we in the peace movement have to do is very patiently articulate to people that we have been causing suffering and we don't have to. I don't believe in holding up a sign saying  "The U.S. is the most violent government in the world!" On the level of facts, this may be true; but it's very counterproductive to say that.

Whereas it can be very productive to give a list of nonviolent alternatives to our current policies, and to present them in a way that people can accept them. That's what I'm asking the peace movement to do: to patiently educate.

Let's talk about this subject more broadly. I know you have strong feelings about education.

I started realizing that something was going wrong with education quite a long time ago, but it took me quite a while to realize how big it was: nothing less than a loss of a sense of the purpose of education. There was no discussion, no statement, no vote; but the next thing you knew everyone from the University president to the students were assuming that the only purpose of learning was to get a job.

What, in your opinion, is the purpose of education?

In my mind, the purpose of education is to enable human beings to develop to their full potential, intellectually and spiritually. That means that students have to be empowered to pursue self-knowledge and the skills that will help them be of service to their fellow human beings. Education should encourage people to develop their curiosity about life; above all, it should not trivialize either the students or their lives.

A basic problem is the centuries-old commitment to materialism: The idea that you can explain everything as the motion of material particles. This is so alienating, both to the teacher and to the student, for one reason because it leaves purpose and questions of meaning outside the educational gate. At a meeting a few years ago, the religious scholar Huston Smith said that we will not make any further progress until we figure out who we are. Right now, he said, we don't have a clue about who we are.

And you're doing something about this?

I took a chance. I said, I bet that kids coming into this University are as sick and tired of trivialization as I am. They don't want reductionism. They don't want a material explanation of everything. They don't want only financial inducement; they are hungry for awareness.

So I invented a freshman seminar called, "Why are we here?" Subtitled: "Great readings on the purpose of life." The first time I taught it, a few years ago, I said: You can interpret this course in any way you want. You can say, "Why are we in this class?," "Why are we here at Berkeley?," or "Why are we on this planet?" They all picked: "Why are we on this planet?"

This told me that young people coming here are hungry to grapple with the major issues of human existence. They are trying to escape from the trivialized, tinsel culture of the mass media. And, unfortunately, what they mostly find here, and in other universities, is an intellectualized version of that reductionism.

Do you believe that nonviolence can improve the human condition?

I absolutely believe that. St. Augustine said, in Book 19 of The City of God, that peace is the deepest aspiration of the human spirit; that peace is a good that does not have to be described in terms of another good. The very name of peace, he said, falls so sweetly on the ear that you do not need to give it any other value.

So I feel, and people of my persuasion feel, that we're actually closer to the core of what human beings are all about. And that very often people want us to help them, even when they're vilifying us as unpatriotic and so forth. And we do stand ready to help.

"You reason with terrorists the same way you reason with non-terrorists: by respecting their humanity and listening to their complaints.'