Heroes for a Better World

Michael Nagler
(1937-)

American Peace Scholar & Spiritual Teacher

birthdate: ?
birthplace:
Brooklyn, New York

QUOTES

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?”

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.

Violence does not bring security; if history teaches anything, it teaches us that.

Security comes from well-ordered human relationships.

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... 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.

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.

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.

 


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