Lapis Magazine

The End of Empire and Rise of Non-Violence by Jonathan Schell

A close study of Twentieth Century history shows that violence as a matter of national policy has been increasingly ineffective and self-defeating. Developing the arguments of his new book, The Unconquerable World, the author shows how strategies of non-violence, from Gandhi to Havel, have become increasingly powerful in their opposition to empire.

Adapted from an acceptance speech on November 13th at the annual gala of the New York Open Center where Jonathan Schell was honored for Masterful Analysis of World Affairs.

Jonathan Schell is the author of the highly regarded new book The Unconquerable World: Power, Non-Violence and the Will of the People. He is also author of The Fate of the Earth, The Time of Illusion, and The Village of Ben Suc. He has been a contributor to The Nation, The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Atlantic, and Foreign Affairs, and has taught at Wesleyan, Princeton and Emory Universities. He is currently the Harold Willens Peace Fellow at The Nation Institute.

We gather at a dark time. Our country, in a wrong turn of truly epic proportions, has turned to force, to violence as the mainstay of its policy menacing and constricting constitutional freedom at home, and approaching the world with a drawn imperial sword.

And yet this evening I want to speak of something hopeful. As I understand it, one of the missions of the Open Center is to cross the boundaries that divide the personal from the public, the spiritual from the political, in other words to be holistic. And to my mind that necessarily entails a turn away from violence toward forms of political action that do not depend on violence, that is on non-violence.

Now it seems to me that in the Twentieth Century we witnessed the bankruptcy of violence, broadly speaking. You all probably know the phrase “war is the final arbiter” and what that means is if you want to find the powerful ones in a given situation, look for the people with the guns. Or in the words of Max Weber, politics operates with very special needs namely power backed up by violence or as Lenin put it, great problems in the life of nations are decided only by force. And this was thought to be true in revolution and obviously even more so in war.

In fact I’d say that the conviction that war is the final arbiter was not so much an intellectual conclusion as it was a passive assumption on all sides: The product not of a question asked and answered, but of one unasked. Yet I want to question the truth of this assertion. And I argue that, in fact, force has become less and less effective in deciding political affairs. I think that the Twentieth Century holds a lesson for the Twenty First, which is that in a steadily and irreversibly widening sphere violence has become dysfunctional as a political instrument. And it seems to me been squeezed on two sides.

At the top of the scale you have the nuclear revolution which has really paralyzed the great powers, preventing them from embarking on a third world war as they once fought two world wars in the Twentieth Century and this paralysis has reached quite far down into international affairs. It’s quite notable that there are many fewer conventional wars between fully fledged nation states. Characteristically, the wars that occur tend to be within states among ethnic groups, civil wars and so forth. As far as those great powers are concerned, something else must decide, something that is not war.

That brings me to the other way in which I think that the whole sphere of violence is being squeezed. What you notice, if you take a look at the history of imperial attempts in the Twentieth Century, is that every single one of the empires that was standing at the beginning of that century had gone under the waves of history by the end. In fact, all of the ones that had been born in the middle of the century, likewise, had disappeared. I’m speaking of the German and the Japanese Empires that were built very briefly at mid- century. So there is something in this world that does not love an empire.

And here’s where the mingling of the spiritual and the political comes in. Ewert Cousins* has already invoked the name of Mahatma Gandhi. It was of course he who, reversed centuries of tradition, which had taught that God was to be sought above all in monasteries and desert places. Instead began to look for God in the public sphere. Of his pursuit of God he said, “If I could persuade myself that I should find Him in a Himalayan cave, I would proceed there immediately. But I know that I cannot find Him apart from humanity.” The aim of his life would be to see God, but that pursuit would lead him into the public square. “For God,” he said, reversing centuries of tradition in a single phrase, “appears to you only in action.”

Now in order to introduce these spiritual energies into politics he had to overcome a profound and very well justified suspicion, which is that those incredibly intense forces, if they were brought into ordinary human affairs, would turn out to be more destructive than constructive. And I don’t think we need to go beyond September 11th to see how true that is. Or for that matter we can look to our own religious fundamentalists who look forward to something called the rapture in which the faithful will be flown up to heaven while everyone else perishes.

What Gandhi did was introduce two disciplines into spiritualized action that rendered it fit for use in the political realm and the first was, of course, the discipline of non-violence. The second was that faiths had to be tolerant of other faiths and join or almost unify with them in seeing that they were many paths to a single end. He insisted on something else that was of key importance that he in fact discovered: not only should government be based on the consent of the people, on the willing assent of their hearts and minds, but actually it did depend on that consent. And therefore he came to understand that if consent were withdrawn, the government would quickly become powerless, bark its orders into empty air, and soon fall. That took some thirty, or forty years but the British did eventually have to quit and the program succeeded.

Now we well might wonder if that was just a one time event. In fact, we see innumerable instances of it and I’ll just cite one more, and that is the fall of the Soviet Union, rather recently. The activists, especially in Eastern Europe, in Poland and Czechoslovakia, and also in Russia, who opposed that Soviet empire, which was really the last of that great empires (save only the one in which we are sitting this evening), reinvented the Gandhian scheme, although without reference to him and really in quite a different spirit – not quite so religious, not quite so explicitly spiritual, not quite so ascetic.

They found a slightly different way to proceed. For instance, Havel spoke of living in truth. Now I don’t think he was offering a translation of Gandhi’s almost untranslatable phrase “satyagraha,” or “truth force” as it’s sometimes called in an inspired translation of that word, it seems to me. Living in truth stood in opposition to living in the lie, which meant living in obedience to the repressive regime. Havel wrote, “We introduced a new model of behavior: Don’t get involved in diffuse general ideological struggle with the center, to whom numerous concrete causes are always being sacrificed. Fight only for those concrete causes and fight for them unswervingly to the end.”

Now why was that living in truth? Havel’s explanation constitutes one of the few attempts of this period or, for that matter, any other to address the peculiarly ineffable question of what the positive inspiration of constructive non-violence is. “By living within the lie, that is by conforming to the system,” Havel said, “individuals confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, are the system.” And so a line of conflict is drawn down through the center of each person who is invited in the countless decisions of daily life to choose between living in truth and living in the lie. That is to say if the state’s commands are a violation deserving of protest, the deepest reason is that they disrupt some elemental good that people wish to be or to do for its own sake.

Now we might think that advice like that would belong in a prayer book, or perhaps a self-help manual: something of solely personal concern. But for Havel, it was quite different because he came to believe that this discipline had practical consequences that were basic to an understanding of political power, and here’s what he had to say about it: “Under the orderly surface of the life of lies therefore, there slumbers the hidden sphere of life and its real aims of its hidden openness to truth. The singular, explosive, incalculable, political power of living within the truth resides in the fact that living openly within the truth has an ally, invisible to be sure, but omnipresent in this sphere.” And so he came by his own route, as did others in that revolution, to the place that Gandhi had arrived at more than a half century before.

I’ve given two examples of the power of non-violent action and these are not marginal events because these were the two greatest empires of their time. And I could give many more examples, but I won’t. I think all democratic activism, down at the bottom, has this character. I’m hoping, in fact, that this is what can turn around the policy of the United States and our very different and far more prosperous, and less arduous context than the one that Gandhi and Havel acted in.

I think that down at the bottom of things also it is this force, this power rooted not ultimately in violence, even when violence has been employed, but rather rooted in the hearts and minds of people, of the people of the earth, that has been the specific cause of the downfall of every single empire of the Twentieth Century with the exception of our own so far.

With this background, what a colossal error it is to seek to get back into business of imperialism as the United States seems to be doing now. For it does seem to me, indeed, that the United States is engaging in the enormously reckless foolishness of seeking to reinvent imperialism for the Twenty First Century. Perhaps you’ve heard the news today. You know there have been explosions in Baghdad almost every day for many weeks, maybe months, and today too there were explosions, but there was a difference. The United States took credit for them and announced that it was attacking from the air parts of Baghdad where it believed the resistance was located. And that’s the way things are going in Iraq.

So empire, the embodiment of force, violates equity on a global scale and I don’t think that any lover of freedom can give it support. Can the world in the Twenty First Century really be ruled from 35,000 feet? Modern peoples have the will to resist and the means to do so. Imperialism without politics is a naïve imperialism. In our time, force can win a battle or two, but politics is destiny. And yet the point I want to leave you with is not that violence is futile, but that the antidote and cure – non-violent political action, direct or indirect, revolutionary or reformist, American or other – is already known. May we apply it soon to relieve our troubled country and world.

* Ewert Cousins, Ph.D., was also honored at the Open Center Gala as a Pioneer in Mystical Understanding and Creative Dialogue among the World’s Religions.