Mencius: The Just Ruler

I found this little parable in “The Cry for Justice,” Upton Sinclair’s 1915 anthology of social protest literature. Mencius was a 4th Century BCE Chinese moral philosopher, a follower of Confucius and contemporary of Plato. Because of his concern with human nature—are people inherently good or evil?—a study of Mencius would be a good fit with the first lesson of the Class of Nonviolence, where we discuss this very topic.

Murder by Statute
From "The Sayings of Mencius"

King Hui of Liang said, "I wish quietly to receive your instructions." Mencius replied, "Is there any difference between killing a man with a stick, and with a sword?" "There is not," was the answer. Mencius continued, "Is there any difference between doing it with a sword and with government measures?" "There is not," was the answer again.

Mencius then said, "In your stalls there are fat beasts; in your stables there are fat horses. But your people have the look of hunger, and in the fields are those who have died of famine. This is leading on beasts to devour men. Beasts devour one another, and men hate them for doing so. When he who is called the parent of the people conducts his government so as to be chargeable with leading on beasts to devour men, where is that parental relation to the people?"

Like Plato in “The Republic,” Mencius advocated the right of the people to overthrow an unjust ruler. What makes us human, he wrote, are our feelings of commiseration for others' suffering. What makes us virtuous is our development of this inner potential. If our “sprouts” are left untended, we can be no more than merely human — feeling sorrow at the suffering of another, but unable or unwilling to do anything about it. If we tend our sprouts assiduously, we can not only avert suffering but also bring about peace and justice in the entire world. This is the basis of another of Mencius' appeal to King Hui of Liang:

[The king] asked abruptly, "How shall the world be settled?"
"It will be settled by unification," I answered.
"Who will be able to unify it?"
"Someone without a taste for killing will be able to unify it…. Has Your Majesty noticed rice shoots? If there is drought during the seventh and eighth months, the shoots wither, but if dense clouds gather in the sky and a torrent of rain falls, the shoots suddenly revive. When that happens, who could stop it? … Should there be one without a taste for killing, the people will crane their necks looking out for him. If that does happen, the people will go over to him as water tends downwards, in a torrent - who could stop it? (1Analects6)

Erich Fromm: The Art of Loving

One of the new essays included in the 16-week “University Class” of Nonviolence is The Art of Loving, by Erich Fromm. Fromm (1900 –1980) was a social psychologist, psychoanalyst, humanistic philosopher and peace activist, associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory. These three videos were recorded with Mike Wallace in 1958, shortly after publication of his bestseller, also called “The Art of Loving.” The second segment most directly speaks to the subject of the essay.

Big Brother Was Watching . . .

One of the strengths of the Class of Nonviolence is its use of original writings: you don’t read about Gandhi – you read what he wrote. Even better, I think, is to peek at original documents. I stumbled into the FBI’s online “reading room,” where the heirs of J. Edgar Hoover archive photocopies of some of their most requested files. Tucked away amid Bonnie & Clyde and the KKK you’ll find a few writers from the Class of Nonviolence: Martin Luther King, Jr., Albert Einstein, Clarence Darrow and Erich Fromm. Many others of interest to scholars of peace and nonviolence are here as well: César Chávez, Marion Anderson, Edward Abbey, Jane Addams, W.E.B. DuBois, the Highlander Folk School, Malcolm X, Eleanor Roosevelt, the ACLU and the AFSC.

Most of the files (this is SO cool) consist of documents: in Fromm’s file, for example, you’ll find the manifesto from the 1965 Washington Mobilization, a petition from the Chicago Committee for a SANE Nuclear Policy and a flier from Women’s Strike for Peace. There are 142 pages on Lucille Ball, described as “testimony at the 1953 House Select Committee on Un-American Activities hearings which reflected her registration to vote as a communist in 1936 due to the insistence of her grandfather.” Did I mention that this is cool?

Justice or Philanthropy?

This is another little gem I found in Upton Sinclair’s anthology “The Cry for Justice.” John Lawson entered the mines as a pit boy when he was eight years old. By the time of the Ludlow Strike and Massacre (1913-1914), of which he writes, he was an organizer for the United Mine Workers. The unnamed philanthropist is, of course, John D. Rockefeller, Jr. To increase profits, his Colorado Fuel and Iron Company cut corners on safety: more than 1,700 miners died in Colorado from 1884 to 1912, a rate 2 to 3.5 times the national average. (A good summary of this era is in Howard Zinn’s A People's History of the United States, pgs 346-349. The headline image is from the Jan 30 1915 New York Times, describing Lawson’s testimony before the Federal Commission on Industrial Affairs inquiry.) We would use this article during the Dorothy Day session of the Class of Nonviolence, where we typically discuss the difference between charity and justice. Think of some contemporary examples . . . companies that brag of their charitable giving while their employees lack health insurance . . .

Concerning Charity
by James R Lawson

There is another case of industrial discontent. This is the skillful attempt that is being made to substitute Philanthropy for Justice. There is not one of these foundations, now spreading their millions over the world in showy generosity, that does not draw those millions from some sort of industrial injustice. It is not their money that these lords of commercialized virtue are spending, but the withheld wages of the American working class.

I sat in this room and heard a great philanthropist read the list of activities of his Foundation “to promote the well-being of mankind.” An international health commission to extend to foreign countries and peoples the work of eradicating the hookworm; the promotion of medical education and health in China; the investigation of vice conditions in Europe; one hundred thousand dollars for the American Academy in Rome, twenty thousand a year for widows’ pensions in New York, one million for the relief of Belgians, thirty-four millions for the University of Chicago, thirty-four millions for a General Education Board. A wave of horror swept over me during that reading, and I say to you that the same wave is rushing over the entire working class of the United States. Health for China, a refuge for birds in Louisiana, food for the Belgians, pensions for New York widows, university training for the elect—and never a thought or a dollar for the many thousands of men, women and children who starved in Colorado, for the widows robbed of their husbands and children of their fathers, by the law-violating conditions in the mines. There are thousands of this great philanthropist’s former employees in Colorado today who wish to God that they were in Belgium to be fed, or birds to be cared for tenderly.

The Cost of War

To a Nine-Inch Gun
By P.F. McCarthy (1915)

Whether your shell hits the target or not,
Your cost is Five Hundred Dollars a Shot.
You thing of noise and flame and power,
We feed you a hundred barrels of flour
Each time you roar. Your flame is fed
With twenty thousand loaves of bread.
Silence! A million hungry men
Seek bread to fill their mouths again.


click here to learn more

This poem was found in Upton Sinclair’s “The Cry for Justice,” an anthology of social protest literature, updated in 1996. As our economy tanks, one of the more intriguing questions in peace studies is the cost of war. We usually discuss this in session seven of the Class of Nonviolence. This is a lively discussion for an economics class, but could also be incorporated into U.S. history. San Antonio author Donald F Fies’s 54-page booklet, American Military History: The Costs of American Wars in Lives and Dollars From April 19, 1775 Through December 31, 2005, includes financial costs for each war in "at-time" dollars and in current dollars compared to total federal government spending. (How many barrels of flour for a $871,000 Tactical Tomahawk missile? I reckon about 4,500.) It’s available on Amazon.com.

These two videos explain the cost of our current U.S. wars, each powerful in its own way:

Thomas Merton

I’ve just completed scanning, proofing and laying out 77 essays for the 16-week “University Class” of nonviolence. A new section, not covered in the 8-week course, is about the Trappist monk, writer and peace activist Thomas Merton. This first video is about the connection between Merton and the Dalai Lama, the second is a hauntingly beautiful montage of one of Merton’s poems, “First Lesson About Man,” with a background of paintings by Giorgio de Chirico.

Online Workshop - Civic Dilemmas: Religion, Migration, and Belonging

Educators are invited to join this free online workshop designed to introduce new materials exploring migration and identity, hosted by "Facing History and Ourselves." The free workshop is from 03/26/2009 - 04/08/2009. Through facilitated online activities and conversations, the workshop will consider how schools negotiate both the needs of diverse student populations and the national need to form community cohesion. To explore these ideas Facing History and Ourselves developed two new publications -- Stories of Identity: Religion, Migration, and Belonging and What do we do with a Difference: France and the Debate Over Headscarves in Schools. Both are available free on their Web site. Pre-registration is required, on their site.

Halide Edip Adivar: a Turkish Peacemaker

Video, “Young Indiana Jones,” The Greedy Heart of Halide Edip, Vol 3, disk 2

For International Women’s Day I watched an excellent “Young Indiana Jones” mini-documentary about Halide Edip Adivar (1884-1964), a Turkish writer, scholar, translator (George Orwell’s “Animal Farm”) and public figure dedicated to the rights of women and Turkish independence (she was the interpreter and press advisor to Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk), who led the successful resistance against the Greek invasion of Turkey.) The class of nonviolence does not have any essays by Muslim writers, and this half-hour video is an opportunity to lift up the story of a non-western Muslim woman.

She met Gandhi on a 1935 trip to India, where she delivered a series of lectures at the National Muslim University in Delhi. She later wrote in her book, Inside India: "Mahatma Gandhi sat on a cushion, surrounded with charcoal braziers, for the night was cold. Eyes from the packed crowd in the hall and eyes from the packed crowd on the spacious platform were riveted on him. The atmosphere vibrated with a mixture of profound affection and mystic fervour. And the fragile figure was more like Buddha than ever. Though I was delivering a speech on a historic phase of a distant country, I was conscious of a distinct line of thought which had nothing to do with what I was saying. I was thinking about the quality of Mahatma Gandhi's greatness."

Ernesto Cardenal: Psalm 5

My favorite essay in the Class of Nonviolence is Letter to Ernesto Cardenal: Guns Don't Work, by Daniel Berrigan. This is a video of Fr. Cardenal reading his paraphrase of Psalm 5: HEAR MY PROTEST Hear my words, Oh Lord, give ear to my groanings. Listen to my protest. For you are not a God who is friendly with oppressors . . .

Anti-War Musical Production Numbers

I had an urge to re-watch the Marx Brothers' Duck Soup (1933), and was rolling on the floor for one hour and eight minutes. The going-to-war minstrel scene ("They got guns, We got guns, All God's chillun got guns! I'm gonna walk all over the battlefield, 'Cause all God's chillun got guns!")is in exquisite bad taste, which, of course, brought to mind the "Springtime for Hitler" scene from The Producers (1968). So, for your viewing enjoyment . . .

Duck Soup

Springtime for Hitler

Civil Disobedience Videos

We'd be interested in finding more short videos that illustrate contemporary instances of civil disobedience. These two 2007 videos -- 15 minutes each -- are good. The first shows a CD campaign in Portugal, against genetically modified seeds that are driving small farmers out of business. The second (produced by high school students!) is about animal liberation.

GMO civil disobedience, Portugal

The ALF and Civil Disobedience

Examples of Civil Disobedience

Civil Disobedience PDF Handout

Most of the examples of Civil Disobedience that we hold up are ancient history to many of our students. They “get” Gandhi’s Salt March and Rosa Parks refusing to sit in the back of the bus but have trouble relating it to contemporary issues. This .pdf handout is a list of 17 recent examples of civil disobedience that we’ve used as a discussion starter. They are meant to be provocative. I struggle, for example, with including pharmacists refusing to fill morning-after pill prescriptions because it infringes on the rights of the women presenting their prescriptions, but it generates interesting discussions.

We would use this list after having read and discussed Thoreau’s essay, defining civil disobedience (“Civil disobedience is a public, non-violent and conscientious breach of law undertaken with the aim of bringing about a change in laws or government policies”) and perhaps engaging in a few other activities, such as watching the civil disobedience debate scene from “The Great Debaters” and acting out a short scene from “The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail.” By this point in the Class of Nonviolence we will also have studied Gandhi (and have shown the Salt March and Dhrasana Salt Works scenes from the film “Gandhi”) and shown the Nashville lunch counter episode from “A Force More Powerful” as part of our exploration of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Human Nature and Aggression

DVD “You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train,” 2004, NR
PDF Handout

In lesson one of the Class of Nonviolence we read Alfie Kohn’s “Human Nature Isn’t Inherently Violent.” A good film clip that supplements this essay is an 8-minute “bonus” feature from Howard Zinn in “You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train,” On Human Nature and Aggression. He makes three points: (1) from his personal experience in WWII, men at war do not naturally want to kill; (2) from his historical research, governments have to persuade the people to go to war and (3) from his anthropological research (Turnbull, Wilson), aggression is caused by circumstances, not human nature. We also sometimes hand out a simplified copy of the Seville Statement, written by an international team of specialists in 1986 for the United Nations sponsored International Year of Peace, which contains five scientific statements about human nature and violence.

Reverence for Life

Albert Schweitzer: Reverence for Live
Young Indiana Jones, DVD, (Vol. 2, Disk 4) 2007, NR

In 1993 George Lucas produced a television series, Young Indiana Jones, which showed his hero participating in many of the great events of his time. The series itself is surprisingly engaging, but the real gems for a peace educator are the special features that accompany each episode. In episode 11 “Oganga, the Giver and Taker of Life," Indy is in Africa and encounters Dr. Albert Schweitzer, recipient of the 1953 Nobel Peace Prize and, as a fellow Lutheran, a great hero of my own youth. This half hour feature will add depth to Schweitzer’s essay in lesson one of the Class of nonviolence and introduce new generations to this exceptional peacemaker. (The YouTube video is from the fictional series, not the accompanying documentary.)

The Mindless Menace of Violence

Bobby
DVD, 2006, R

Bobby is a fictionalized account of the hours leading up to the June 5, 1968 shooting of Robert F. Kennedy following his win in the California Democratic Party primary. The last scene (#16, 10 minutes) shows the assassination and its aftermath. As we watch in horror, Kennedy’s voice engages us, slowly intoning the speech he delivered the day after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. just a month before, “On the Mindless Menace of Violence.” This is incredibly powerful: in my opinion, one of the finest American speeches ever written. A printable version is available online from the JFK archives. Give everyone a copy. This could be a thoughtful opening for the first session, or a concluding meditation.

Goya's Ghost: does torture work?

Goya’s Ghost
DVD, 2006, R

In this film the painter Goya becomes involved with the Spanish Inquisition when his muse, Ines, is arrested by the church for heresy. The most powerful episode with contemporary relevance is about torture (scenes 12-14, about 10 minutes.) Ines is tortured into confessing that she is secretly practicing Jewish rites. Her father, in an attempt to get her released, invites the inquisitor to dinner with the family. He tries a bit of bribery, then logical argument, but Lorenzo will not budge. The father then has his sons and servants torture the monk to extract a false confession . . but let’s not give it all away. This is an excellent film, well worth watching in its entirety, although the scene in which Ines is tortured is probably not suitable for a high school audience. We sometimes show Goya’s paintings (The Third of May 1808 and the Disasters of War etchings) as part of lesson six, and this excerpt works well there too.

Gandhian Terms Crossword and Word Search

Gandhian Terms Crossword and Word Search
PDF handout

When reading about Gandhi I confess to sometimes muddling the unfamiliar terms: is “swaraj” self-rule or a boycott? (It’s self-rule, and I remember it by recalling that the British Raj indicated British rule.) This PDF file contains two separate handouts that give students an opportunity to play around with 15 of the words they may encounter in their Gandhian studies: ahimsa, bapu, bramacharya, charkha, Dalit, dhoti, fakir, Harijan, hartal, khadi, mahatma, sarvodaya, satyagraha, swadeshi and swaraj. The crossword puzzle is the harder of the two because it doesn’t include the words, just the definitions. The word search puzzle includes both words and definitions: in addition to searching out the words, though, it is necessary to match them up with the corresponding definition. I’m not going to provide you with the answers – looking up the ones you don’t know is your exercise!

The Great Debaters

The Great Debaters
DVD, 2007, PG-13

Based on a true story, The Great Debaters is about the 1935 Wiley College debate team from Marshall, Texas, who broke the color barrier to take on national champion Harvard (in real life it was USC, but let’s not quibble) and won. It’s a wonderful movie, evocative of the era and well worth showing in its entirety, but we show the last two scenes but one, #23 (The Harvard Debate) & #24 (Victory.) The students debated civil disobedience, Wiley invoking Thoreau and Gandhi and Harvard taking the side of the rule of law. It is an excellent conversation starter to accompany the reading of Thoreau’s “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience” in lesson seven.