a blog by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl

In November of 1998, the United Nations General Assembly made a remarkable declaration. The first decade of the new millennium, 2001-2010, the delegates said, would be an International Decade for the Promotion of a Culture of Peace and Non-Violence for the Children of the World. This followed upon a declaration made a year earlier that set the millennial year 2000 as the Year of the Culture of Peace. In the intervening year “non-violence” had entered the conceptualization, as the positive premise of “the culture of peace.”

That is, the UN delegates were not thinking of peace as simply a negative, the absence of war. “Non-violence” had come to signal something richly constructive: ecological non-violence. socio-political non-violence, and political non-violence—a broad, Gandhian program of recovering the natural world and natural ways of living. By 2005, half way through the decade, so many NGOs around the world had signed up to the UN’s intention, and were educating so many millions of people in techniques for establishing a culture of peace and non-violence in their families, communities and countries, that one NGO report referred to this world-wide university, collectively, as “the other superpower.” (You can read these fascinating reports at http://decade-culture-of-peace.org/2005report.html.)

Outside of Europe, “the other superpower” had been broadly united in its critique of America, the one of the two so-called superpowers that had been left standing at the end of the Cold War. For example, on January 31, 2003, Nelson Mandela called upon both Americans and people everywhere to organize demonstrations in protest of George Bush’s plan to invade and occupy Iraq. Speaking in Johannesburg, Mandela said that an American President “who has no foresight and cannot think properly” was going “to plunge the world into a holocaust.” He even went so far as to raise a topic that is almost never discussed in America –the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945: “if there is a country that has committed unspeakable atrocities in the world, it is the United States of America.” America, he was saying, had no place to stand to accuse Iraq of preparing to use weapons of mass destruction when it had never owned up to its distinction as the one country that had ever used such weapons. According to BBC News, at least ten million people–probably many more– in sixty countries turned out for non-violent protests on February 15, 2003; the largest mass action in the history of the world.

Although so many outside of America and its allies among European leaders (not European citizens) consider America to be a key source of violence, the only organized political parties that work with versions of the full Gandhian eco-socio-politico vision are the Green Parties (which are active, of course, in America on a small scale, and in Canada and Europe on a much larger and more influential scale, with representation in the European Parliament). The beginning of the new millennium was also the moment when the Green Parties had reached the point in their evolution of some two decades when they stood ready to issue a Global Greens Charter. This document, ratified by national Green Party delegates from all over the world at a 2001 meeting in Australia, is in the same spirit as the UN effort to promote “a culture of peace and non-violence for the children of the world.”

I think that many people in America have no idea that the social democratic Green Parties are globally networked (with four federations of the national parties on four continents) or that their purpose is so embracing, not just environmentalist. Since the German Greens took the lead in the late 1970s in formulating party platforms and general statements, Greens have concerned themselves with “four pillars”: “Ökologisch”, “Sozial”, “Basisdemokratisch” and “Gewaltfrei” –ecological, social, basic democratic (referring to what in English is usually called participatory democracy), and non-violent. The Global Greens Charter elaborates the four pillars, and the parties themselves stay as close to participatory democracy in their own practices as possible.

We tend to think of 2001 only as the year of 9/11 and the launch of the “war on terror”; but it was also a year of great achievement in non-violent political life. The Cold War has been succeeded not by a “clash of civilizations” (as conservative theoreticians assert) but by a struggle between people all over the world, loosely organized, who want to live in a culture of peace and those who live by violence. That would be all the so-called civilizations made up of violent religious fundamentalists of all sorts and states that are militaristic and locked into arms races. It’s the Superpower –if we understand power as what arises when people act together as equals—vs. the Superviolences. (The distinction between power and violence implied in this description is one Gandhi and Arendt shared –and I will come back to it later.)

The actions of all the non-governmental people and organizations associated with the UNs’ Decade, with the anti-war protests of the 2000s, with the Green Party actions since the Greens Chartered themselves globally –these are all political actions, not moral statements. Satyagraha (non-violent resistance and non-cooperation) is a strategy for these people and organizations –and it runs across what they do as ecological activists, social justice activists, local and national and international organizers. But they do not think that they have to be Gandhian in their moral or spiritual lives to follow their vision. Their statements do not begin with self-rule or self-restriction; as individuals they do not usually ground themselves in ascetic practices or meticulously carried out vegetarianism. The Global Green Charter lucidly indicates that over-consumption is a problem of the first order –as does Tim Jackson’s Prosperity Without Growth, although without any political program—but the Charter does not teach that any person who wishes to act in the world to reduce earth-destroying and poverty-creating consumption must first conduct what Gandhi called “experiments with truth” to determine the best way to minimize his or her food intake.

For a thinker like Hannah Arendt, drawing a clear line between people’s moral lives and decisions and their political lives was of great importance –for the health and well-being of their political lives. This is how she summarized her distinction: “In the center of moral considerations of human conduct stands the self; in the center of political considerations stands the world.” Let me see if I can succinctly say what this aphorism means.

Basically, Hannah Arendt thought that in a world which has seen all moral standards collapse or reveal themselves to be only customs or mores of particular cultures, people have no doctrinal resort to help them resist either the temptation to bad deeds or to good deeds –often they cannot even judge what is bad and what good, and they do horrendous deeds in the name of some good. That is, the temptation to do good deeds can lead to inflicting perverse and violent ideas about what is good on other people. When moral standards have collapsed or been revealed as without either divine origin or natural law foundation, we ought to recognize, she felt, that morality is an individual matter of ”the standard of the self.” It is you saying to yourself “I will not do this deed because I could not live with myself if I did.” Not you saying “Thou shalt not kill.” This spontaneous internal conversation, not any commandment will guide your hand when you are confronted with a moral question or a moral dilemma; and you should remain humble in your conversation, not advertising it or commanding anyone else to follow you. Humility is the essential characteristic of the moral person. Morality that is prescribed or arrogantly dictated by commandments is always a step in the direction of authoritarianism –particularly in a time when all commandments have been infinitely corrupted as people have turned “Thou shalt kill” into “Thou shalt kill all your neighbors of this sort down to the very last child.”

Hannah Arendt was so averse to moralism in any form that she found companionship in her view with a fellow most people think of as the consummate immoralist among political thinkers: Machiavelli. He’s the one who supposedly recommended to princes that they learn to be bad. But this is not what Hannah Arendt read in The Prince. She saw a recommendation that princes learn not to be tempted by moralizing and do-gooding that is self-aggrandizing and prescriptive to others. Telling others what is good and good for them, will eventually be anti-republican, anti-political. Machiavelli’s famous aphorism “Better save your city than your soul” meant, she thought, that it is important above all to act in the political realm with regard for others, for equality, for solidarity in achieved agreements, the common world, and leave saving your soul to the privacy of your internal conversation, your conscience.

If the first decades of Hannah Arendt’s writing life were dedicated to the question “Was ist Politik?” and to giving the word “politics” the deep exploration it deserves, the last decade of her life was dedicated to the question “what is judgment?” And how does it operate in political action? What is its relation to conscience? She was writing on these questions for her last book, The Life of the Mind in the years I studied with her, and her reflections then seemed to me so right and so essential. She was all about how to be a political person and to exercise political judgment in particular political situations, without recourse to rules from inherited moral or religious traditions of any sort. But this week I found myself thinking her ideas through again, questioning. I’ve been wondering if it is possible –especially in our world–for people to be political in her sense without the example in their minds –the guidance in their minds—of a political actor who kept his standard of the self while being political, worldly.

This week I’ve been reading –for the first time—Mahatma Gandhi’s extraordinary autobiography. As well as a selection of biographies and books about the man by those who knew him, and several works by people now considering him and his life with their particular political situations in mind –like a manuscript by Ramin Jahanbegloo, an Iranian activist and supporter of the current Green Revolution in Iran, who teaches political theory here at the University of Toronto. Reading Gandhi and reading about him, I think I understand better than before why he was and has remained the exemplar of non-violent action and thinking. But also how he managed to be non-prescriptive, non-commanding, worldly person, just as averse to moralism and religious admonishing as Arendt was, although he was a spiritual adept, a religious man. I will write about this next post, from my state of astonishment before who he was.

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