Journal of Radical Nonviolence

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Religion, Power and the Social Good (continued again)
2007-04-04 16:31:00
This post continues a series that began with Richard Dawkins Misses the Point, followed by Religion , Power and the Social Good and Religion, Power and the Social Good (continued). In the previous installments I defended the claims (1) that there is such a thing as a genuinely "spiritual" or "religious" experience; and (2) Genuine religious experience depends on biological mechanisms which could eventually be mapped in the brain, and these mechanisms developed for solid evolutionary reasons. In this post I continue to defend three remaining claims.(3) Religion as we know it today is historically linked to the authentic religious experience just proposed The question that Dawkins and Dennett want to answer is how religious fundamentalism, which seems so obviously dysfunctional and maladaptive, yet so ubiquitous, evolved. This cruel trick of evolution is likened by Dennett to the parasite known as the fluke. Religion is seen as its own raison d'etre, a persistent selfish meme, that ha...
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Religion, Power and the Social Good (continued)
2007-04-02 03:34:00
This post continues a series that began with Richard Dawkins Misses the Point, followed by Religion , Power and the Social Good . In the previous installment I defended the claim that there is such a thing as a genuinely "spiritual" or "religious" experience, claim (1). In this post I continue to defend four remaining claims.(2) Genuine religious experience depends on biological mechanisms which could eventually be mapped in the brain, and these mechanisms developed for solid evolutionary reasons.I have already argued that the physiological changes that occur in the brain when a subject encounters a genuine religious experience, a profound and life-altering shift of perspective, are potentially measurable by science.This represents a somewhat controversial argument to those accustomed to thinking that higher states of consciousness actually transcend the physical body and operate independently of matter; but it is a perfectly pedestrian observation in the context of evolutionary theor...
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Religion, Power and the Social Good
2007-03-31 17:50:00
This represents an elaboration of yesterday's post.It's probably foolish for me to try to do justice to the title of this blog post in a blog. Whole books have been written about such things--indeed, I have written one of them myself! (Forthcoming)But I would like to further expand on the idea suggested but not fleshed out in my earlier post that the true religious impulse could fulfill all of the following conditions:1) that it's a genuinely "spiritual" or "religious" experience (rather than a passing sensation like a stomach ache or a feeling like pleasure)2) that this experience depends on biological mechanisms which could eventually be mapped in the brain; and, further, that these mechanisms developed for solid evolutionary reasons3) that religion as we know it today is historically linked to this experience4) that religion has served diverse purposes, many diametrically opposed to the wisdom implicit in the original experience itself, resulting in catastrophic social ills5) ...
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Richard Dawkins Misses the Point
2007-03-30 19:51:00
Richard Dawkins was interviewed earlier this week by Terry Gross on Fresh Air about his recent book, The God Delusion. Though I have read neither of them yet (look for reviews of both on this blog, eventually), Dawkins' book follows a very similar pattern to Daniel Dennett's latest tome, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. They are both learned books from breathtakingly articulate and lucid thinkers.But, in this case, neither one of them knows what they are talking about.I attended a talk by Dennett during his book tour promoting his recent work and spent much of the hour wincing as Dennett trampled upon ground that he clearly did not understand. (By the way, I have enormous respect for Dennett's work and admire his chutzpah in trying to explode some of the persistent and erroneous myths of our intellectual culture. But here, as he speaks of God, he clearly treads beyond his depth.)The same may be said of Dawkins, based on this week's Fresh Air interview.For th...
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Further Proof You Don't Really Matter
2007-03-30 16:20:00
It will emerge as a consistent theme in this blog that one consequence of our violence-based culture is a dynamic of power wherein the little guy usually, and (as a statistical average) necessarily, finishes last. This of course contradicts the myth of our culture that everyone has an "equal opportunity" to succeed; that our democracy empowers everyone; and that "rags to riches" has not only been known to happen but is in some signal sense characteristic of the American way.All of this is perfect hogwash.Allow me to share a simple example from my own experience earlier this week. My partner purchased some airline tickets using our joint debit card, totaling more than $700. I don't know about you, but that counts as a big purchase in our household, and we had waited until she got a bit of a windfall to purchase these tickets. Immediately, a hold was placed on that amount in our checking account (detectable as a big difference between our actual balance and our available balance). A ...
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Quick Results and Guantanamo
2007-03-27 15:50:00
It's only 2007 and already we have a single guilty plea formally entered by a Guantanamo detainee held since 2001. And this is seen as a vindication of the Bush administration (!), according to today's NYT:The guilty plea is sure to be seen by administration supporters as an affirmation of its efforts to detain and try terrorism suspects here, although the government’s detention policies still face significant legal and political challenges.Bush supporters will tell you that the delay isn't their fault, after all:The Pentagon had originally hoped to begin trying detainees in the spring of 2002, but the Bush administration’s system for military tribunals has been the subject of lengthy legal challenges.Who's fault is it, then? Why of course, that unwieldy legal system we have! The whole point of Guantanamo was to avoid that very beast. So how can you blame the administration for the delays?Here's how:The Supreme Court struck down the administration’s first plan for tribuna...
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If Politics Were Honest
2007-03-22 14:29:00
In today's New York Times there's a report about new FDA rules to reduce conflict of interest of doctors who sit on powerful advisory panels at FDA that approve or retract approval for pharmaceutical drugs. Here's the meat of it:Expert advisers to the government who receive money from a drug or device maker would be barred for the first time from voting on whether to approve that company’s products under new rules announced Wednesday for the F.D.A.’s powerful advisory committees. Indeed, such doctors who receive more than $50,000 from a company or a competitor whose product is being discussed would no longer be allowed to serve on the committees, though those who receive less than that amount in the prior year can join a committee and participate in its discussions.To say the least, I wasn't very satisfied by the honesty of those quoted for the report, so here it is, rehashed with "improved" truth content:“The $50,000 threshold is something that we think strikes an ap...
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The Evolution of Morals
2007-03-20 19:03:00
In today's New York Times there is a wonderful article about the biological origins of morality. Because the article featured the newest research of Frans de Waal, who cut his teeth back in the 1960s discussing the biological origins of aggressive behavior in primates, I took notice.It certainly caught my eye when the article suggested:[Biologists] believe that if morality grew out of behavioral rules shaped by evolution, it is for biologists, not philosophers or theologians, to say what these rules are.This way of framing the issue, presented in the second paragraph of the article is, I think, needlessly confrontational and not supported by the remainder of the piece. I doubt there are many philosophers or theologians who would wish to say what the "behavioral rules shaped by evolution" are, since that is quite obviously the province of biology (or at least evolutionary psychology), not ethics.More intriguing is the question, posed later in the article, between "is" and "ought":Ph...
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Failure to Be Shocked
2007-03-19 14:52:00
One consistent theme that will emerge from this blog is a failure to be shocked by abuses of power. I am continually amazed by how shocked so many of us become when we discover such abuses--in fact, I find this more shocking than the abuses themselves.Abuses of power are not shocking to me because they are perfectly inevitable, at least in our present culture. In general, our relationship to power is profoundly immature. Worse, we seem to celebrate this immaturity. We revel in a relationship to power defined by the idea, "Power means I can do whatever I want."This idea lacks wisdom; it's extremely dangerous; and it's pervasive. It is the source of the triple evils of the modern world: poverty, war and ecological negligence. Pulsing at its core, I believe, is a dynamic which I call the logic of violence. I will explain this concept in more detail in future posts.Here's an example: today's revelation, as reported in The New York Times:Almost two years before the Federal Bureau of ...
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The Weather Underground
2007-03-18 18:10:00
I finally got around to watching the documentary, The Weather Under ground (2002), and I'm very glad I did.It is a completely approachable and poignant tale of the militant faction of the Students for a Democratic Society that split off in 1969 and began a decade-long run of violent actions against the establishment, mostly directed at the Vietnam War.I share with the Weathermen (or "Weatherpeople," as one interviewee in the movie called them) a grim analysis of the conscience of the United States government--and elites the world over for that matter. But something went terribly awry. This film beautifully captures the madness that set this group of smart, thoughtful and dedicated revolutionaries upon a path toward violence that finally overwhelmed and destroyed them.As one former member observes, "Violence didn't work." It marginalized them, ran its course, and dried up. In the end, most of the group turned themselves in to the authorities, the last of these in 1980. Fortunately f...
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Nonviolence Toward Ants
2007-03-18 03:40:00
The big news in nonviolence circles this week comes from Kuala Lumpur (unfortunately not Washington, D.C.), as reported by the Associated Press:Buddhist monks, who are bound by faith to nonviolence, are grappling with how to rid a temple of a severe ant infestation without killing the insects.Frankly, I think this story got reported because it represents a caricature of nonviolence, making the idea easier to marginalize. But the case does offer a valuable lesson in nonviolence theory, which follows.Here's a thought experiment: imagine that, instead of red stinging ants, the monastery had become overrun by scorpions or, for that matter, violent guerrillas armed with semi-automatic weapons and quite willing to use them. What would the monks have done then?In any of these cases, including the actual one, a power struggle emerges between two mutually incompatible groups over residency of the monastery. The main difference between the actual case and my imaginary ones is that, in the la...
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What Is "Radical Nonviolence"?
2007-03-16 15:13:00
Nonviolence means many different things to many different people. At its most tepid, it refers to little more than effective conflict resolution within current geopolitical realities, such as U.N. peacekeeping forces (which are actually not at all nonviolent in conception) and the like. What I mean, and what the idea's best-known proponents, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr, meant by the term is something rather deeper.Emerson describes three stages of "cultivation." At the lowest stage, "the man fights, if he be of a sound mind and body." In the middle stage, "he makes no offensive demonstration, but is alert to repel injury." At the highest stage, which Emerson means to hold up as his ideal:[H]e comes into the region of holiness; passion has passed away from him; his warlike nature is all converted into an active medicinal principle; he sacrifices himself, and accepts with alacrity wearisome tasks of denial and charity; but, being attacked, h...
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