tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21188028376778286482024-02-07T04:06:39.219-06:00The W(a/o)ndererJonathan McRayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11320785725421810116noreply@blogger.comBlogger53125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2118802837677828648.post-69253762606355198992012-08-06T12:59:00.000-05:002012-08-06T12:59:11.861-05:00Nonviolence and PacifismNonviolence and pacifism are often pitted against one another, even though pacifism was once considered the activist term to distinguish it from nonresistance. Now, pacifism is thrown under the bus, even by vigorous advocates of nonviolence. For instance, Gene Sharp clarifies that nonviolent action is <i>action that is nonviolent</i>, as opposed to pacifism (Sharp, 2005, p. 41), some of whose proponents might see nonviolent action as much too coercive (Sharp, 1990, p. 149). In many definitions, pacifism is almost pejoratively defined as rejecting violence on moral grounds without a concern for sociopolitical conditions <b>1</b>, while nonviolence focuses on political change without violence. Although, one might be nonviolent in one situation but not in another. Arab arguments for nonviolence have strongly differentiated it from pacifism, which is associated with abandoning “a concern with redressing social grievances, and a commitment to changing unjust social structures” (Crow & Grant, 2009, pp. 34-35). <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkxxBJiVHoW7SwPMEtbQIXJVdlk69em99L67zCLQPy3jnglaK5B7_oU92qelQ8XaA6K0N0nA8-s57mR53RZJVcK4tbiTt55xVsf1fHRmfVam3vpTWAwSMF-b0IU4TQfE6Z0R1b4dHHNbs/s1600/pacifism2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear:left; float:left;margin-right:1em; margin-bottom:1em"><img border="0" height="400" width="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkxxBJiVHoW7SwPMEtbQIXJVdlk69em99L67zCLQPy3jnglaK5B7_oU92qelQ8XaA6K0N0nA8-s57mR53RZJVcK4tbiTt55xVsf1fHRmfVam3vpTWAwSMF-b0IU4TQfE6Z0R1b4dHHNbs/s400/pacifism2.jpg" /></a></div>Still others go further, equating pacifism and nonviolence but arguing that they are ineffective and impose patriarchal morals on the poor. Nonviolent advocates and pacifists, these critics say, ignore the vital role of violent militants in supposedly nonviolent movements, probably because nonviolence is usually proposed by privileged white people who expect poor people of color to suffer through injustice while waiting for the fabled critical mass (Gelderloos, 2007, p. 23).<br />
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Criticisms of nonviolence and pacifism are extremely important, and do indeed exist, especially of domesticated liberal nonviolence. In some ways American nonviolence hasn’t really evolved since the 1960s and remains predominantly symbolic: bumper-sticker signs, marching, and petitioning the powers for permits to petition the powers, etc. Symbolic acts are necessary, but they could simultaneously function as rituals <i>and </i>as subversive disruptions, such as when the Plowshares Movement burned draft cards with homemade napalm and hammered millions of dollars of damage into, and poured blood over, nuclear warheads while quoting biblical prophets. <br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzrafDhhosdQubLZicbSmMp0puBjlHUfIkTn9wqRqHdLvsQe1cmOUccU6sH_9Z7bwZ7QtRzDYjryuzHRacUvrT1kZ0CVZA5e5A_qP0wdLEAvu8Xr-fB_QyvxIk7xgzqOWODzEg7u-St0I/s1600/berrigan+bros.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left:1em; margin-right:1em"><img border="0" height="400" width="279" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzrafDhhosdQubLZicbSmMp0puBjlHUfIkTn9wqRqHdLvsQe1cmOUccU6sH_9Z7bwZ7QtRzDYjryuzHRacUvrT1kZ0CVZA5e5A_qP0wdLEAvu8Xr-fB_QyvxIk7xgzqOWODzEg7u-St0I/s400/berrigan+bros.jpg" /></a></div>Even so, taking some of the above criticisms seriously is a bit difficult <b>2</b>. Nonviolence does sometimes support the state, but violence doesn’t fare any better. And, ironically, arguing that nonviolence is racist actually sounds a little racist. These arguments assume that Indian independence and American civil rights mainly worked because they faced Christian nations with moral consciences (Apsey, 1990, p. 27); they wouldn’t have succeeded if they opposed repressive dictators, presumably black or brown dictators. Setting aside ignorance about British massacres and American segregation, I wonder how critics explain the nonviolent ousting of Pinochet in Chile, cultural resistance against the Roman empire (<i>ibid</i>, p. 27), nonviolence among the revenge-oriented Pashtuns (Flinders, 1990, p. 190), and resistance to the Nazis in Norway, Holland (Schwarcz, 1990), Denmark, and the Rosenstraße protests in Berlin (Chenoweth & Stephan, 2011, p. 20), just to name a very few. Not to mention that nonviolent campaigns are twice as successful as violent ones (<i>ibid</i>, p. 7) partly because they do motivate diverse mass participation (<i>ibid</i>, pp. 30, 39, 192). Maybe critical mass isn’t so fabled after all. <br />
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Furthermore, violent wings of nonviolent movements may actually prohibit success, with 50% leading to civil war within ten years, compared to 27% of movements that didn’t have armed campaigns (<i>ibid</i>, p. 218). Radical responses do sometimes coexist, and sometimes make easy distinction difficult (<i>ibid</i>, p. 12) such as in People Power in the Philippines, but it was only after the nonviolent mass movement emerged that major change occurred in overthrowing the U.S.-backed dictator (<i>ibid</i>, p. 169). Additionally, while the first Palestinian <i>intifada </i>didn’t end the Israeli occupation or halt settlement construction, the uprising “achieved more than had decades of armed attacks” (King, 2009, p. 146). Supposedly, extremist coalitions make modern oppositionists appear more attractive, but the opposite is historically more likely: armed groups cause regimes to violently unify against the threat without distinguishing between nonviolent and violent campaigns (<i>ibid</i>, p. 43). Dividing the regime’s support base contributes to success, and nonviolence has the strategic advantage, contra the belief that it’s tactically inferior. Violent campaigns are physically prohibitive and have a harder time recruiting women and the elderly (<i>ibid</i>, p. 35), making it inherently hierarchical. Nonviolent action has less physical, informational, and moral barriers (<i>ibid</i>, p. 34).<br />
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The moral barrier implies that hard and fast lines between nonviolence and pacifism might be fuzzier. One of the best parts of criticisms of pacifism and nonviolence (aside from surfacing latent discriminatory and ineffective tendencies within some modes) is showing that the two are not worlds apart. To be sure, pacifists can be haughty moralists who wouldn’t flick a fly, or blow up Danish railways to resist the Nazis, but nonviolent activists can also sound like world-weary martyrs who smugly lament their pragmatism, but such is life. The difference between the two is often implicitly framed around morality and empiricism: pacifism supposedly responds solely out of religious dogma while nonviolence pays attention to context. However, strategy can’t escape ethical judgments: arguing for nonviolent tactics puts a value-claim on effectiveness first, or on the possibility of violence at some point. Exclusively privileging faithfulness or effectiveness is a dangerous game, because one can result in pious inaction while the other can result in justifying the same tactics employed by the regime. Perhaps some pacifists are simply remaining faithful to effectiveness. After all, religion and morality are evolved parts of the human condition, with roots in ritual and empathy <b>3</b>.<br />
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I’m not able to dispel all the divisions that exist between pacifism and nonviolence. I’m not really even interested in doing so. Both words have been used to refer to a moral ethos and to strategic resistance. <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2U6AG_4ilePm_TyODV484J1abcmtWYP80phGJe_afql6rD6kUPu5ZbgwcsFG4Mc-2y4vHjfSfTQwEnqkqsowKFDwE8Zog-JeHE6FTflbZs32MM8HuVqDoFNgSnuxBbe56AYe6_5s_8UQ/s1600/goering.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear:right; float:right; margin-left:1em; margin-bottom:1em"><img border="0" height="320" width="222" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2U6AG_4ilePm_TyODV484J1abcmtWYP80phGJe_afql6rD6kUPu5ZbgwcsFG4Mc-2y4vHjfSfTQwEnqkqsowKFDwE8Zog-JeHE6FTflbZs32MM8HuVqDoFNgSnuxBbe56AYe6_5s_8UQ/s320/goering.jpg" /></a></div>During the Nuremberg trials, Herman Göring explained that outlawing pacifism helped capture power for the Nazis, because if you denounce pacifists as unpatriotic and therefore a threat to security, more people flock to the leaders. I call myself a pacifist partly because I like the word better. Etymologically, pacifism is one who makes peace. At a certain time, I preferred nonviolence over pacifism, probably because of the overused complaint that it sounds like <i>passivism</i>. But now I resonate more with the word <i>pacifism </i>because it has a deeper cadence and rhythm, almost a complicated narrative flavor, and it speaks to what it is rather than what it is not. Still, I like the linguistic <i>via negativa</i> of the word <i>nonviolence</i>. Whichever word is used, I will reject both unless they are an embodied praxis engaging economic, social, and political life. Unless they <a href="http://www.thekingcenter.org/king-philosophy#sub4">refer </a>to “an all-out war against poverty,” against the “spiritual and physical homicide” of racism, and a “true revolution of values” against “the spiritual death” of war. On this point, I am in solidarity with the critics. <br />
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At the very least we can say that both nonviolence and pacifism should attempt to understand and redirect violence. Maybe we should shelf the tired terms for a spell and speak of life-giving or death-dealing acts, which could hopefully reframe exhausting debates about property destruction. Purist definitions ignore the fact that it’s not possible to act and remain perfectly pure (Deming, 1990, p. 95). Pacifism is not at odds with physical force, with the force of physicality such as sit-ins, strikes, human chains, and roadblocks. Pacifism, or nonviolence, is the art of presence, which is collective action and organized movements that evade restrictive control by exploring potentiality and new open spaces (Bayat, 2009, pp. 48-49). We strategically place our political bodies in the body politic. “But what would you do if someone’s raping your sister or mother or girlfriend?” Apparently, one can insert any female at this point, pun intended. “Well, what would you do?” You pull the offender off her! Nonviolence is not a legalistic course of action implemented in moments of tension; it is a way of engaging with people and the world. Nonviolence, or pacifism, is relationship, and you can’t have a relationship with someone while they’re raping your best friend’s cousin’s boyfriend’s aunt. <br />
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If we shelf these cumbersome concepts, we could also talk about <i>satyagraha </i>and the commensurability of ends and mean. <i>Satyagraha</i>, or grappling with the force of truth, means that aggression and energy aren’t repressed but are instead converted and transfigured. Because we must come to grips with the anger and rage within ourselves. In this case, nonviolence is violence transformed; it is “<i>trans</i>violence, where the power of passions like anger, hatred, and fear is reshaped into a potent fighting force” (Flinders, 1990, p. 189). After all, violence is a form of communication; it intends to say something. However, violence may be the only communicative act that has predictable effects on the other party without any need to understand them (Graeber, 2011, p. 48). Anarchist David Graeber thinks this is violence’s most characteristic trait: “its capacity to impose very simple social relations that involve little or no imaginative identification” (<i>ibid</i>, p. 49). He suggests that violence is “the trump card of the stupid, since it is that form of stupidity to which it is most difficult to come up with an intelligent response” (Graeber, 2011, p. 49).<br />
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As far as I can tell, Graeber is mostly referring to the structural and repressive violence of state regimes than to the revolutionary violence of the poor, which often seems to be the main target of critique by liberal proponents of nonviolence (Myers, 1994, p. 243), who are actually few and far between. I empathize with some violent liberation movements, with Frantz Fanon’s anguished pleas to understand the “‘knowledge of the practice of action’” (Deming, 1990, p. 97). “First World” activists and peacebuilders run the risk of looking down our condescending noses at the violent actions of the oppressed without ever experiencing constant domination. However, militarized revolutions almost always reproduce the cycle which they sought to overthrow, because they are dependent on the same worldviewing and the same resources, like the international arms trade, in order to resist empire. The result is more deaths and another suppressive regime. As Audre Lorde said, “[T]he master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine transformation” (Lorde & Clarke, 2007, p. 112-3). For instance, the first Palestinian <i>intifada </i>was predominantly a concerted and mobilized nonviolent revolution, and it paved the way for the Oslo Peace Accords. However, in the aftermath of Oslo’s failure, the second violent <i>intifada </i>began, in which suicide bombings drastically increased. Ten years later, the situation on the ground is far worse with a massive concrete wall, intensified movement restrictions, and accelerated settlement construction. As Ched Myers reminds us: “The romantic myth of the guerilla fighter armed with only an AK-47 and a heart full of revolutionary love is just that—a romantic myth” (Myers, 1994, p. 243).<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCILx8X3D77yisEgeTGu6HpvUj2HrEkzCQeGqwpqA1dQoQQghX7Fyw-08zv5e4mWFFtJ8GiNCGn9XZhKHb9pxR9-hr0tKZ7uYWX8aKGS8U-M_EP_g9l7udnkEQE4DQZcWHc8sT3T7L4qM/s1600/intifada.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear:left; float:left;margin-right:1em; margin-bottom:1em"><img border="0" height="292" width="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCILx8X3D77yisEgeTGu6HpvUj2HrEkzCQeGqwpqA1dQoQQghX7Fyw-08zv5e4mWFFtJ8GiNCGn9XZhKHb9pxR9-hr0tKZ7uYWX8aKGS8U-M_EP_g9l7udnkEQE4DQZcWHc8sT3T7L4qM/s320/intifada.jpg" /></a></div>“First World” activists must tread carefully when suggesting strategic responses to oppression they do not suffer, especially if they can’t distinguish between Israeli soldiers with automatic guns and Palestinian kids with rocks. But polite silence is not solidarity (<i>ibid</i>, p. 239); imperialistic intervention and wholesale acquiescence are both dead-ends. However, once we know and have witnessed we are called by the event to respond, whether in action or feigned ignorance. In a way, we have a stake simply by now being present. Allies should offer insights, advice, and experience, which are all embedded in valuations of the world. But ultimately, we should balance voicing concerns and making suggestions with leaving the final decision to people whose lives are irrevocably intertwined with persecution, even if we disagree with the ultimate decision.<br />
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We also need to strike a life-saving balance between self-assertion and respect for others (Deming, 1990, p. 104). This evolved instinct bypasses the aforementioned domesticated nonviolence that mostly appeals to humanistic consciences, thus providing a lot of fodder for legitimate criticism. Radical action troubles conscience <i>and </i>resorts to power (<i>ibid</i>, p. 100). Nonviolence is a sheep in wolf’s clothing, or maybe a chimera of the two. Apparently, the only animals capable of love are those who maintain this equilibrium (ibid, p. 104). Maybe Jesus of Nazareth was right when he said we love others as we love ourselves, or as we assert our own lives. Radical action might encompass the love of neighbors and love of enemies. <br />
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Las Abejas exemplifies this equilibrium and also helps reconcile nonviolence and pacifism. Las Abejas is a Christian pacifist civil society of indigenous Maya in Chiapas, Mexico, committed to nonviolent resistance against neoliberalism, imperialism, and militarism. Much of their advocacy centers on agricultural work, threatened by Mexican and international economic policies (Kovic, 2003, p. 67). The land is intimately related to their identity as indigenous people: it is “our life and our freedom” (Tavanti, 2003, p. 61). Las Abejas means “the bees” in Spanish, because “like the bees we want to build our houses together, to collectively work and enjoy the fruit of our work . . . We want to produce 'honey' but also to share with anyone who needs it” (Tavanti, 2003, p. 5). One member noted that bees are small insects that can disturb a sleeping cow with one sting (<i>ibid</i>, p. 5). The queen of this hive is the kingdom of God (Kovic, 2003, p. 70), or the <i>queendom </i>of God. Las Abejas represents the need for liberatory interepretations of religious traditions (Bayat, 2009, p. 50), because religions aren’t fixed (<i>ibid</i>, p. 44): they are like rivers, cascading in tributaries and undercurrents. After all, Jesus was an indigenous Galilean craftsman who instigated the prophetic renewal of Israelite tribal confederacy, challenging both domestic elites and foreign imperialism. <br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBg8_vkMFAnh3UE1CpAowLUfEXgnBXKF9p45vZSIQMSZ4ZRyRt8c1q_D2VOeOoGKOW9l1Q3Cvt5S83eHeIR-U82HhJI47pv1X8TMG5jJj8q6sYg_ErA6SWMptIABd8xCAB0R08mmshqzU/s1600/las+abejas.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left:1em; margin-right:1em"><img border="0" height="243" width="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBg8_vkMFAnh3UE1CpAowLUfEXgnBXKF9p45vZSIQMSZ4ZRyRt8c1q_D2VOeOoGKOW9l1Q3Cvt5S83eHeIR-U82HhJI47pv1X8TMG5jJj8q6sYg_ErA6SWMptIABd8xCAB0R08mmshqzU/s400/las+abejas.jpg" /></a></div>Las Abejas began in 1992 in response to a land dispute in which one man was killed and several others injured (Kovic, 2003, pp. 62-64). Five men were arrested without warrant and wrongly accused of the attack (<i>ibid</i>, p. 64). Las Abejas, who promoted nonviolent resolution to the dispute, organized 200 indigenous Tzotzil to march 41 kilometers and sit in front of San Cristobal’s cathedral to protest the unjust arrests; by the time they arrived, 5,000 people had joined (<i>ibid</i>, pp. 65-66). The five men were soon released (<i>ibid</i>, p. 66) <b>4</b>. Five years later, a paramilitary group <a href="http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C0CE4D91E3EF935A15751C1A961958260&scp=4&sq=acteal&st=nyt">killed </a>45 members of Las Abejas who were praying in a chapel in Acteal, even as police officers stood 600 feet away and government authorities took five hours to respond. But Las Abejas, as they called for justice, also called for forgiveness and reconciliation. They believed that commitment to all three constituted their nonviolence.<br />
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This is a delicate constitution. For a month or so, friends of mine and I slept a night or two a week in the home of a nonviolent protest leader outside of Bethlehem in case of military night raids. Soldiers were often in communication with this leader and obviously knew where he lived. They once suggested that they come to his house for tea and discuss alternatives to weekly protests against the wall. He replied that they were not welcome now, because they had the power to come whenever they wanted. When the conflict was over, he said, they were welcome for tea, <i>ahlan wa sahlan</i>, but until then he would see them at the demonstrations. I’ve been called an anti-Semite for work I’ve done in the occupied territories, and for even calling them “occupied territories.” At the same time, an activist friend severely questioned my concern for Palestinians because I worked for a reconciliation group. To her, all such groups are projects of normalization that care nothing for justice, for home demolitions or night raids or checkpoints or arrests or settlements. And yet she accused me as we drove to the home of the nonviolent protest leader.<br />
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Transformation may begin with covenanting ourselves to the wreckage and gift of the beautiful risk of life. The Realist, however, throws in the cards and says, “This world is what we have and we must accept it,” which isn’t really realism as much as it is elitism. To recognize the violence of the world, and to recognize that our current ways of living exacerbate this, and then to suggest that we must continue this currency, is the most unrealistic thing imaginable. Knowing something doesn’t work and yet continually expecting it to work borders not only on unrealism but on stupidity. I think Freud said this is the definition of insanity.<br />
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<b>1</b>: However, Jessie Wallace Hughan argues for the possibility of pacifist resistance to military invasion (Hughan, 1990, p. 169).<br />
<b>2</b>: Especially with <a href="http://www.trainingforchange.org/nonviolent_action_sword_that_heals">responses </a>like George Lakey’s, who notes that a much higher proportion of people of color have engaged in nonviolent action than white people (see also Myers, 1994, p. 239). <br />
<b>3</b>: Of course, ritual, and therefore religion, has roots in scapegoating violence and destructive mimesis. Compelling theological work has noted how the Christian narrative of crucifixion and resurrection exposes this violence through solidarity with the scapegoated victim. However, ritual also evolves from play, and beneficial mimesis also forms culture. <br />
<b>4</b>: As far as I know, few white people were involved.<br />
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References <br />
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Apsey, L. S. (1990). How transforming power has been used in the past by early Christians. In R. L. Holmes (ed.), <i>Nonviolence in theory and practice</i> (pp. 27-28). Belmont: Wadsworth Publishing Company.<br />
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Bayat, A. (2009). No silence, no violence: A post-Islamist trajectory. In M. J. Stephan (ed.), <i>Civilian jihad: Nonviolent struggle, democratization, and governance in the Middle East</i> (pp. 43-63). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. <br />
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Chenoweth, E. & Stephan, M. J. (2011). <i>Why civil resistance works: The strategic logic of nonviolent conflict</i>. New York: Columbia University Press.<br />
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Crow, R. E. & Grant, P. (2009). Questions and controversies about nonviolent political struggle in the Middle East. In M. J. Stephan (ed.), <i>Civilian jihad: Nonviolent struggle, democratization, and governance in the Middle East</i> (pp. 31-42). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. <br />
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Deming, B. (1990). On revolution and equilibrium. In R. L. Holmes (ed.), <i>Nonviolence in theory and practice</i> (pp. 94-104). Belmont: Wadsworth Publishing Company.<br />
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Flinders, T. (1990). The good fight—Badshah Khan, the frontier Gandhi. In R. L. Holmes (ed.), <i>Nonviolence in theory and practice </i>(pp. 187-191). Belmont: Wadsworth Publishing Company.<br />
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Gelderloos, P. (2007). <i>How nonviolence supports the state</i>. Boston: South End Press.<br />
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Graeber, D. (2011). <i>Revolutions in reverse: Essays on politics, violence, art, and the imagination</i>. New York: Autonomedia. <br />
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Hughan, J. W. (1990). Pacifism and invasion. In R. L. Holmes (ed.), <i>Nonviolence in theory and practice</i> (pp. 168-177). Belmont: Wadsworth Publishing Company.<br />
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King, M. E. (2009). Palestinian civil resistance against the Israeli military occupation. In M. J. Stephan (ed.), <i>Civilian jihad: Nonviolent struggle, democratization, and governance in the Middle East</i> (pp. 131-155). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. <br />
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Kovic, C. (2003). The struggle for liberation and reconciliation in Chiapas, Mexico: Las Abejas and the path of nonviolent resistance. <i>Latin American Perspectives</i>, 30, 58-79. Retrieved July 14th, 2012, from JSTOR.<br />
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Lorde, A. & Clarke, C (ed.). (2007). <i>Sister outsider: Essays and speeches</i>. Berkeley: Crossing Press. <br />
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Myers. C. (1994). <i>Who will roll away the stone?: Discipleship queries for first world <br />
christians</i>. Maryknoll: Orbis Books.<br />
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Schwarcz, E. (1990). Nonviolent resistance against the Nazis in Norway and Holland during World War II. In R. L. Holmes (ed.), <i>Nonviolence in theory and practice</i> (pp. 184-187). Belmont: Wadsworth Publishing Company.<br />
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Sharp, G. (1990). Nonviolent action: An active technique of struggle. In R. L. Holmes (ed.), <i>Nonviolence in theory and practice</i> (pp. 147-150). Belmont: Wadsworth Publishing Company.<br />
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(2005) <i>Waging nonviolent struggle: 20th century practice and 21st century potential</i>. Boston: Porter Sargent Publishers.<br />
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Tavanti, M. (2003). <i>Las Abejas: Pacifist resistance and syncretic identities in a globalizing Chiapas</i>. New York: Routledge. Jonathan McRayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11320785725421810116noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2118802837677828648.post-30466053161821822122012-08-05T08:27:00.000-05:002012-08-05T08:27:29.090-05:00Nonviolence and PalestineIn 2008, I worked as a journalist and interim editor in Ramallah for the Palestine Monitor, a web-based news source committed to “exposing life under occupation.” I traveled throughout the West Bank, writing several articles about the village of Ni’lin, whose olive groves and roads are fractured due to the construction of the separation wall. I witnessed and engaged with villagers, as well as Israeli and international activists, nonviolently protesting the confiscation and devastation of their land. I attended the first demonstration at Ni’lin on the inaugural day of construction. Villages like Ni’lin have lost and are losing increasing amounts of land, including ancient and viable farmland, to the wall, mostly built deep into Palestinian territory. <br />
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We marched from the town center to the outskirts, where we could see three Israeli settlements reaching like white hands over the ashen hilltops. The military and police, accompanied by Caterpillar bulldozers, watched with finger-laden triggers as youth crawled in front of machinery and we gathered around as popular committee leaders spoke with soldiers.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5-LHgNQ0bzviJMInp-idu9oIRcC6DgXItMngNnZxFHQs1muFexxStrUkxDwd4JXei-pKBcUmrexNqCkSX1vyBhSuRdYYaOKktMZ1F0peJ66VK7jft5-dsiK6SdrX8nIAbhN8d9XOtuKs/s1600/IMG_8619.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear:right; float:right; margin-left:1em; margin-bottom:1em"><img border="0" height="200" width="150" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5-LHgNQ0bzviJMInp-idu9oIRcC6DgXItMngNnZxFHQs1muFexxStrUkxDwd4JXei-pKBcUmrexNqCkSX1vyBhSuRdYYaOKktMZ1F0peJ66VK7jft5-dsiK6SdrX8nIAbhN8d9XOtuKs/s200/IMG_8619.JPG" /></a></div><br />
The villagers assured the military that we were there nonviolently. But the squad commander barked an order and sound grenades began exploding at our feet and rubber-coated bullets spiraled through teargas clouds. Stone-throwing never seemed effective to me, but I struggled labeling it violence, especially as they bounced off tanks and kevlar. Either way, stones and M-16s are not easily comparable. Every protest I attended followed a similar chronology: the Israeli military always fired first, the crowd dispersed, and stones fell wildly.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVTzbYCgX2C_RrIRimuGm5mngVlBx8nZwsFnKwOP23ZusIeUsFeKa1Z7uCo5ioRJHow2BuneD8zvbyDjoYniS7Ut2n75uVXOFY2uNhA76GBcqxOFF5mzmncnar2lnLu3YSlMoFg3tXrW4/s1600/IMG_9665.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear:left; float:left;margin-right:1em; margin-bottom:1em"><img border="0" height="320" width="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVTzbYCgX2C_RrIRimuGm5mngVlBx8nZwsFnKwOP23ZusIeUsFeKa1Z7uCo5ioRJHow2BuneD8zvbyDjoYniS7Ut2n75uVXOFY2uNhA76GBcqxOFF5mzmncnar2lnLu3YSlMoFg3tXrW4/s320/IMG_9665.JPG" /></a></div>Police and military repeatedly responded with teargas (including an apparatus that shot 16 at once), rubber-coated bullets, and live fire, most of which are supplied by the United States. At other demonstrations, the atmosphere was festive (Chenoweth & Stephan, 2011, p. 36) with beating drums and cookware, whistles and chants. And yet each time we were disrupted by charging soldiers and sparks from sound grenades lighting ancient olive trees aflame.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2Vp9vs-WWfcY_gNOVK4_Zu-WiHB_VEntmCq4Xf0uEHDHrz1_uubNQc__Drtn5a5i2iCScwZY6mhm1m_huVYMRF4_7gDgrb-aUI74wU6lY3O9Izt37mJiwOhEJAO2wovUwrt91Yhr6lRc/s1600/IMG_1859.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left:1em; margin-right:1em"><img border="0" height="400" width="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2Vp9vs-WWfcY_gNOVK4_Zu-WiHB_VEntmCq4Xf0uEHDHrz1_uubNQc__Drtn5a5i2iCScwZY6mhm1m_huVYMRF4_7gDgrb-aUI74wU6lY3O9Izt37mJiwOhEJAO2wovUwrt91Yhr6lRc/s400/IMG_1859.JPG" /></a></div><br />
I have heard some commentators praising Palestinians’ newfound application of nonviolence, almost surprised to see such a thing in the Middle East. This Orientalist view, often espoused by American political leaders, is not only hypocritical (because Israel and the U.S. are never encouraged to employ nonviolence) but is extremely ignorant of Palestinian history. Jews, Muslims, and Christians lived in the so-called Holy Land as neighbors for centuries. But European partitioning of the Middle East ruptured the land like tectonic plates and a massive influx of Jewish immigrants arrived on Mediterranean waves, many propelled by Zionism. This ideology espoused labor and land acquisition by replacing Arab workers with Jewish workers and by purchasing Arab land which could then no longer be sold to Arabs (King, 2009, p. 151) [<b>Footnote</b>]. However, Palestinians strove to protect their life and land, from both exclusive Zionist policies and British control, through nonviolent tactics such as organizing delegations, boycotts, resignations, and strikes (<i>ibid</i>, pp. 131-132). Around 97% of the First <i>intifada</i>’s tactics were nonviolent (Chenoweth & Stephan, 2011, p. 119). And over 70% of Palestinian youth <a href="http://www.haaretz.com/news/un-70-of-palestinian-youth-oppose-violence-to-resolve-conflict-with-israel-1.273315">oppose </a>violence in the conflict against Israel.<br />
<br />
I’ve also heard criticisms that Palestinian nonviolence lacks a central leader like Gandhi or King who can rally the troops. But this obscures the fact that prominent leaders have existed (King, 2009, pp. 135-140), many of whom have been imprisoned or deported. During the First intifada, high-ranking Palestinian leaders lived in exile from the daily toil of occupation. Instead, popular committees cultivated a movement of leaders, some more visible than others. Interestingly, the Communist Party, often associated with a revolutionary vanguard capturing the state, publically advocated for nonviolent tactics and “popular organizing of small, locally-governed institutions,” believing that these could transform social structures as a prerequisite for national independence (<i>ibid</i>, p. 134). Decentralized power guaranteed the movement’s survival: as members were jailed new ones stepped in their shoes (<i>ibid</i>, p. 134). At one point, popular committees, often initiated and run by women (<i>ibid</i>, p. 140), numbered around 45,000, a groundswell that emerged into a concerted civil society from which the intifada forcefully streamed (<i>ibid</i>, pp. 133-134). Parallel institutions, a classic nonviolent tactic of intervention (Sharp, 2005, pp. 19, 460), made the occupied territories ungovernable as Palestinians governed themselves (<i>ibid</i>, p. 142). For instance, the small village of Beit Sahour, where I’ve spent most of my time in Palestine, organized some 12,000 people into 36 committees, diversified along class and gender lines (<i>ibid</i>, p. 140). Direct democracy and nonviolence are not an import to the Middle East. <br />
<br />
I know someone who has hoped to make a career out of working in Palestine. During a conversation about the then-imminent Palestinian bid for statehood, he quipped that, if the request succeeded, he might be out of a job before he even gets started. He probably meant it sardonically, but the implication was that a Palestinian state is the answer, as if abject poverty, political infighting, Muslim-Christian hostility, ecological devastation, and IDF-mimicking police forces would suddenly vanish in the wake of a salvific state. So far, nation-state frameworks have resulted in the Palestinian Authority and Hamas. After the PA’s institution, women were mostly excluded from decision-making even though they had been leaders of popular committees (Chenoweth & Stephan, 2011, p. 137). Perhaps state-focused organizing is the best tactical option considering that all four nonviolent secessionist campaigns since 1900 have failed (<i>ibid</i>, p. 73). While Palestinian self-determination isn’t strictly secession, the West Bank is certainly contiguous with Israel through economic dependency, security collaboration, and Israel’s resource control. Land is continually pulled from beneath Palestinians’ feet like a carpet, and Israel’s monopolization of water sources may decide the conflict for everyone. <br />
<br />
However, nonviolent resistance has an advantage in territorial campaigns like self-determination and anti-occupation (<i>ibid</i>, p. 7). The consensus on nonviolence during the First intifada fell apart in the third year after enough leaders were deported or imprisoned (<i>ibid</i>, p. 145), making a decentralized movement of leaders extremely urgent. Perhaps the greatest possibility lies in the resurrection and sustainability of popular committees. They already play an important role in the <i>intifada </i>against the wall (King, 2009, p. 149), and have been effective in Budrus, Bil’in, and initially in Ni’lin. Popular committees could connect with grassroots Israeli movements, like Israeli-Bedouin agricultural partnerships in the Negev, or movements like <i>Arba Imahot</i> (Hermann, 2009, p. 262). Maybe people would hear voices like Martin Buber who, instead of initially fighting for a Jewish state, called for an Arab-Jewish confederation in the land.<br />
<br />
The section of the wall through Ni’lin is now complete, but the protests continue. <br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZdiYFFRkv19jPjdsu_-z8A_ulQZy2ZK9jAOascPU2DVlQgxQyZvfJMhKz5zZ9AUANpVqX4x9EL1PK984e9DbsD7FM4UrESd76sbAfw4Xl5o2jQDaEjAF7rwyWl8MBRdpvR5bjjIQO498/s1600/IMG_3449.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left:1em; margin-right:1em"><img border="0" height="300" width="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZdiYFFRkv19jPjdsu_-z8A_ulQZy2ZK9jAOascPU2DVlQgxQyZvfJMhKz5zZ9AUANpVqX4x9EL1PK984e9DbsD7FM4UrESd76sbAfw4Xl5o2jQDaEjAF7rwyWl8MBRdpvR5bjjIQO498/s400/IMG_3449.JPG" /></a></div><br />
<b>Footnote</b>: In my mind, this makes Chenoweth and Stephan’s claim that Israel is a rare example of a democracy following a violent insurgency (Chenoweth & Stephan, 2011, p. 219) highly problematic, especially because 750,000 Palestinians fled or were forced out of their homes during this period. These land acquisitions are still occurring. <br />
<br />
<br />
References<br />
<br />
Chenoweth, E. & Stephan, M. J. (2011). <i>Why civil resistance works: The strategic logic of nonviolent conflict</i>. New York: Columbia University Press.<br />
<br />
Hermann, T. (2009). Winning the mainstream: Arba imahot, the four mothers movement in <br />
Israel. In M. J. Stephan (ed.), <i>Civilian jihad: Nonviolent struggle, democratization, and governance in the Middle East</i> (pp. 253-264). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. <br />
<br />
King, M. E. (2009). Palestinian civil resistance against the Israeli military occupation. In M. J. Stephan (ed.), <i>Civilian jihad: Nonviolent struggle, democratization, and governance in the Middle East</i> (pp. 131-155). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. <br />
<br />
Sharp, G. (2005). <i>Waging nonviolent struggle: 20th century practice and 21st century potential</i>. Boston: Porter Sargent Publishers.Jonathan McRayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11320785725421810116noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2118802837677828648.post-36864714324974872372012-08-02T11:07:00.001-05:002012-08-02T11:07:59.132-05:00Nonviolence and DemocracyApparently, nonviolence and democracy are strongly connected. In fact, nonviolent resistance campaigns are much more likely than violent ones to pave the way for “democratic regimes” (Chenoweth & Stephan, 2011, p. 10). Even failed nonviolent campaigns are more likely than successful violent revolutions to establish something democratic (<i>ibid</i>, p. 202). Nonviolent campaigns are often successful because they elicit diverse mass participation (<i>ibid</i>, pp. 30, 61), an obvious condition for democratic governance. This is certainly evident in the Muslim Pashtun movement and nonviolent army (Raqib, 2009, pp. 109, 113), popular committees during the first Palestinian <i>intifada </i>(Stephan, 2009, p. 315), Golani Druze resistance against Israeli identity cards (Kennedy, 1990, p. 197), and Norwegian teachers and churches, as well as Dutch railway workers, against the Nazis (Schwarcz, 1990, pp. 185, 187). <br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzwT4ky4qbl7zWotZQm6SIUCS5vKMS2R8MXUENBRF_6ehG_I2TlFog_rcw05SE2-ljoEoS3FmNg21YHAyKNdQ8kY5PCqZt82cnHC5LTQop2rTcZINAH8slApb_h1Xs2b07nYXaGgPM4d8/s1600/Why+civil.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear:right; float:right; margin-left:1em; margin-bottom:1em"><img border="0" height="200" width="133" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzwT4ky4qbl7zWotZQm6SIUCS5vKMS2R8MXUENBRF_6ehG_I2TlFog_rcw05SE2-ljoEoS3FmNg21YHAyKNdQ8kY5PCqZt82cnHC5LTQop2rTcZINAH8slApb_h1Xs2b07nYXaGgPM4d8/s200/Why+civil.jpg" /></a></div><br />
But what in the world is democracy? The term resides in a restless spectrum, so perhaps the adjective <i>democratic </i>should be employed more than the noun. Even so, most conversations about democracy decline to define it. At the end of their book <i>Why Civil Resistance Works</i>, Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan eventually explain democracy as a national institution in which leaders are voted for through competitive elections, citizens have enforceable civil liberties, and government is divided into checks and balances (Chenoweth & Stephan, 2011, p. 203). This emphasis on checks, balances, and competitive elections might suggest why capitalism has followed democracy everywhere like Mary’s little lamb. <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMbiTB40_coenR3Zwejqf5gxL5AYNSG_3nYJ4iJupRZZqskQMPvTIhz3tXpMGgGo9JxoLGJ5MWtHZPflbn0Xfq0j6thqBGfF4-fo7GXONwbp9LxKAu72krFEdYPNgoYUGxQaPm6EOdUg4/s1600/77maryHadALittleLamb.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear:left; float:left;margin-right:1em; margin-bottom:1em"><img border="0" height="185" width="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMbiTB40_coenR3Zwejqf5gxL5AYNSG_3nYJ4iJupRZZqskQMPvTIhz3tXpMGgGo9JxoLGJ5MWtHZPflbn0Xfq0j6thqBGfF4-fo7GXONwbp9LxKAu72krFEdYPNgoYUGxQaPm6EOdUg4/s200/77maryHadALittleLamb.jpg" /></a></div><br />
And this emphasis is one of the West’s greatest assembly-lined exports. Anthropologist David Graeber quips that the West certainly didn’t invent democracy, but they did spend “several hundred years invading and spreading democracy to people who were practicing democracy for thousands of years and were told to cut it out” (Graeber, 2004, p. 93). Because of this, defining democracy in many places leads to enraged debates because the word is associated with imperial models and with economic liberalization (VeneKlassen & Miller, 2007, p. 27).<br />
<br />
Chenoweth and Stephan recognize that their definition falls under the category of liberal democracy (Chenoweth & Stephan, 2011, p. 203), which is only one among many forms (VeneKlassen & Miller, 2007, p. 29). They further note that modernization theory assumes that democracy is only possible within liberal political societies (ibid, p. 203). Defining democracy this way smells suspiciously like Eurocentrism, especially because equating democracy with voting is a recent historical classification. Consensus decision-making was the necessary norm in many societies without an apparatus to enforce majoritarian decisions, but indigenous village councils aren’t often considered democratic because they don’t vote (Graeber, 2004, p. 88). The nonviolent egalitarian society of the Buid (Braun, 1990, pp. 182-184) and the consensus decision-making of the Druze (Kennedy, 1990, p. 201) trouble the notion that democracy, and nonviolence, is only found within modern liberalism.<br />
<br />
Even so, liberal state democracy is usually presented as a social contract that prevents widespread violence. However, many historians now claim that state-making originated, not to protect people from violence, but to organize for the purpose of war (Cavanaugh, 2004, p. 250). European peasants staged major popular rebellions, causing some of the most tumultuous periods in European history, during the infancy of the nation-state when royal leaders consolidated power through uniform language, currency, and taxes over huge territories (<i>ibid</i>, pp. 248-249). State-making is historically a form of violence. <br />
<br />
The transition method often predicts the outcome of the new state regime (Chenoweth & Stephan, 2011, p. 204), but even democratic regimes are hard for “we the people” to handle, as is currently obvious in the United States. Chenoweth and Stephan argue that citizens’ circumventing normal political avenues highlights democratic weakness (<i>ibid</i>, p. 211), but it might instead expose some level of incompatibility between nonviolence and nation-states. The two don’t seem to go together easily. After all, a strong connection exists in resistance movements between hierarchy and violence (<i>ibid</i>, p. 35), which are the structure and function of the modern nation-state. Surely a representative democracy is theoretically better than a totalitarian dictatorship, or even a liberal democracy over an illiberal one. And perhaps a regime could be democratic, but is that the best we can imagine, or even witness, in the world? <br />
<br />
The emphasis on liberalism and voting highlights a discrepancy between Chenoweth and Stephan’s definition and many movements that become democracies. Active participation in social movements increases the post-transition prospects for engaged citizenry, but interestingly popular disillusionment with government often follows nonviolent transitions (<i>ibid</i>, p. 207). This could be because the road to accountable governments is long (VeneKlassen & Miller, 2007, p. 25), but it could also be the inevitable result of replacing horizontal participatory movements with procedural systems of checks and balances, especially when the former seem marked by creativity and the latter by constraint. So why move from decentralized networks of direct democratic engagement to institutionalized modes of hierarchical democracies? Unfortunately, people often treat the former as an interim phase until the latter is achieved, but then after the new regime takes the reigns they longingly remember the good days of resistance. Quality of engagement is just as important as quantity (Chenoweth & Stephan, 2011, pp. 30, 39), but after the quality dilutes, the quantity dwindles. <br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgbwHQdgawFEFrrXP1wqnVpi2cKocbF93V2caI1PxkrGEm_NxKvLwKGrk3-b429ZSdz3hwi6Gy4tSOG8yMxvADOD50tope31Il8wzEngQbMFqQreRBlSdg9Za3uDozI6MAj4tiyiuTXZg/s1600/1229-Gene-Sharp_full_600.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear:left; float:left;margin-right:1em; margin-bottom:1em"><img border="0" height="214" width="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgbwHQdgawFEFrrXP1wqnVpi2cKocbF93V2caI1PxkrGEm_NxKvLwKGrk3-b429ZSdz3hwi6Gy4tSOG8yMxvADOD50tope31Il8wzEngQbMFqQreRBlSdg9Za3uDozI6MAj4tiyiuTXZg/s320/1229-Gene-Sharp_full_600.jpg" /></a></div><br />
Gene Sharp acknowledges that while nonviolent action is usually extra-constitutional because it doesn’t rely on established institutional procedures, he believes it could be incorporated into statist systems (Sharp, 1990, p. 149). Therefore, he argues, nonviolent action shouldn’t be confused with anarchism (which is indirectly what we’ve been discussing) because the latter hasn’t adequately thought about practically achieving their envisioned society, much less realistic means for social struggle that are substantially different from the state (<i>ibid</i>, p. 149). In a recent <a href="http://wagingnonviolence.org/2012/07/participation-is-everything-a-conversation-with-erica-chenoweth/">interview</a>, Erica Chenoweth seems to agree with Sharp when she critiques nonviolent action’s over-reliance on inefficient leaderless movements. Both fine scholars do not appear to have encountered much of the long history of anarchist praxis and seem unaware of extensive anthropological research on anarchistic societies (Graeber, 2004, pp. 13, 39). And both, at least Chenoweth, make a mistake in equating leadership with hierarchy. Leadership could be hetrarchical, which implies distinction without rank, evident in Palestinian popular committees or Druze consensus processes. <br />
<br />
Interestingly, despite Sharp’s and Chenoweth’s concerns, nonviolent social movements emphasize “civic organization and decentralized power,” which are the “bedrock of democratic development” (Stephan, 2009, pp. 314-315). So why not continue the popular committees? Local Palestinian communities organized village-level popular committees all across the West Bank (<i>ibid</i>, p. 315). From neighborhoods to regions, committees formed around education, medical-relief, agriculture, business, and social reform (Chenoweth & Stephan, 2011, p. 124). These autonomous structures overcame social divisions by encouraging deep participation (<i>ibid</i>, p. 138). All of this sharply contrasts with the Palestinian Authority that followed the partially successful movement (Stephan, 2009, p. 315). In Pakistan, the Khudai Khidmatgar strove to reform not only political life but also social and economic life (Raqib, 2009, p. 109). Members cooperatively shared work to realize the goal of the country’s economic self-sufficiency from colonial power (<i>ibid</i>, p. 110).<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkV3hLAMzEoRbuWHfWZst2Bj5vBcNSFepkiInjVEB5NkBuy3O01R0lUsIaAVuT1ziJLEEnOHayNXxySHgkAkM0fxmQJHXobVQp_g1di-ukbRaENu41nrTWdpF4QCcxqo9ASmJuHoQsgqo/s1600/Nv-army-gray_BG.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left:1em; margin-right:1em"><img border="0" height="272" width="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkV3hLAMzEoRbuWHfWZst2Bj5vBcNSFepkiInjVEB5NkBuy3O01R0lUsIaAVuT1ziJLEEnOHayNXxySHgkAkM0fxmQJHXobVQp_g1di-ukbRaENu41nrTWdpF4QCcxqo9ASmJuHoQsgqo/s320/Nv-army-gray_BG.jpg" /></a></div>Of course, alternative institutions should not be content to only carve out enclaves within the current order, but should also challenge it, as Palestinians and Pashtuns did, because the top-level Metonyms don’t voluntarily modify. Instead, the point of anarchism is direct democracy by building a new society in the shell of the old. Perhaps nonviolent social movements should view themselves as the harbinger of the impossible becoming possible. <br />
<br />
<br />
References<br />
<br />
Braun, S. (1990). Jungle nonviolence. In R. L. Holmes (ed.), <i>Nonviolence in theory and practice</i> (pp. 181-184). Belmont: Wadsworth Publishing Company.<br />
<br />
Cavanaugh, W. (2004). Killing for the telephone company: Why the nation-state is not the keeper of the common good. <i>Modern Theology</i>, 20, 243-274.<br />
<br />
Chenoweth, E. & Stephan, M. J. (2011). <i>Why civil resistance works: The strategic logic of nonviolent conflict</i>. New York: Columbia University Press.<br />
<br />
Graeber, D. (2004). <i>Fragments of an anarchist anthropology</i>. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.<br />
<br />
Kennedy, R. S. (1990). The Druze of the Golan: A case of nonviolent resistance. In R. L. Holmes (ed.), <i>Nonviolence in theory and practice</i> (pp. 193-203). Belmont: Wadsworth Publishing Company.<br />
<br />
Raqib, M. (2009). The Muslim Pashtun movement of the north-west frontier of India, 1930-1934. In M. J. Stephan (ed.), <i>Civilian jihad: Nonviolent struggle, democratization, and governance in the Middle East</i> (pp. 107-118). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. <br />
<br />
Schwarcz, E. (1990). Nonviolent resistance against the Nazis in Norway and Holland during World War II. In R. L. Holmes (ed.), <i>Nonviolence in theory and practice </i>(pp. 184-187). Belmont: Wadsworth Publishing Company.<br />
<br />
Stephan, M. J. (2009). <i>Civilian jihad: Nonviolent struggle, democratization, and governance in the Middle East</i>. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. <br />
<br />
VeneKlassen, L. & Miller, V. (2007). <i>A new weave of power, people, and politics: The action guide for advocacy and citizen participation</i>. Bourton on Dunsmore: Practical Action Publishing.Jonathan McRayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11320785725421810116noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2118802837677828648.post-53418643864790790672012-07-01T16:53:00.000-05:002012-07-01T16:53:42.220-05:00Proximity Matters: The Place of Democracy Part IVParochialism or not, community is unavoidable if we understand humans as social creatures dependent for better and worse on lives beyond ourselves. However, community is often without a livable definition by being limited to “conversations of shared interest.” Shared interests and ideas are integral to community, which should include psychological and emotional connections (Ohmer & DeMasi, p. 6; Carr, p. 26). But ideas and interests are fleeting and can divide neighbors based solely on cognitive affiliations. Different ideas ensure critical thought and even reinforce one another, especially since we always live and work with people with whom we vehemently disagree and still consider them friends, lovers, and colleagues (Graeber, 2004, pp. 8-9).<br />
<br />
Because of this, I respectfully quibble with Cheryl Walter, to whom community is “an inclusive, complex, and dynamic system, <i>of which we are a part</i>” (p. 69). To clarify, I agree with this but her existing definition too easily leads to expressions like the “online community” or the “global community,” <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsiHBjMshqvcbAOSlyUTW0wcHvjAmfSaD6wiSEVkCx8_k5DdaTmLLgD2WhUmr8XGQ7P1tFb3K-3H0Jt4KKJB6O69u56IMcfla5ft4ulNTHlWgm1gSvzHo5aLAxxvIGP8jUz0iEmmCdD4A/s1600/global+community.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear:right; float:right; margin-left:1em; margin-bottom:1em"><img border="0" height="228" width="221" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsiHBjMshqvcbAOSlyUTW0wcHvjAmfSaD6wiSEVkCx8_k5DdaTmLLgD2WhUmr8XGQ7P1tFb3K-3H0Jt4KKJB6O69u56IMcfla5ft4ulNTHlWgm1gSvzHo5aLAxxvIGP8jUz0iEmmCdD4A/s320/global+community.jpg" /></a></div>which may appreciate interconnectedness but also dilute, or delude, community of any bioregional emphasis, local mutuality, and ultimately interdependence. And so community ironically remains individualistic: we are connected so long as nothing is required of us. Democracy functions similarly in a procedural republic like the United States.<br />
<br />
Walter suggests that community has no structure (<i>ibid</i>, p. 74) and even though she admits that community happens in context (<i>ibid</i>, p. 72), she dichotomizes social/demographic community from multidimensional/dynamic community (<i>ibid</i>, p. 70). <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjF6wT4Hms_td0rUm9IX3QegS9x4uzaLiN2I_oFlxeLq_U6bH_oAED_OCQrS0Ti3FfFd0jfzK6dGKvzQMVt3b9T9pJ-WRoL0dXyv_e7ygiOd80LU6lX_Cum51qa32CAHtrSZMJh0twvrvE/s1600/IMG_6058.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear:left; float:left;margin-right:1em; margin-bottom:1em"><img border="0" height="320" width="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjF6wT4Hms_td0rUm9IX3QegS9x4uzaLiN2I_oFlxeLq_U6bH_oAED_OCQrS0Ti3FfFd0jfzK6dGKvzQMVt3b9T9pJ-WRoL0dXyv_e7ygiOd80LU6lX_Cum51qa32CAHtrSZMJh0twvrvE/s320/IMG_6058.JPG" /></a></div>A process-structure concept, which is an adaptable dynamic process that maintains form without rigidity over time (Lederach, p. 84), accommodates both. Community is a multidimensional system, but I think Walter’s attempt to cover all forms of social relationship as community makes places vulnerable to extractive market forces and therefore homogenization. She short shrifts the notion of the commons, as well as the crucial role of trust and partnership in community (Walter, pp. 80-1). And her definition, like many others, is entirely anthropocentric. We cannot, as some assume (Minkler & Wallerstein, p. 33), divorce ecological and social systems, because the latter take their lives from the former. <br />
<br />
Such people seem hostile to community incorporating anything geographic (Carr, p. 25) and argue that communities solely based on interest, such as the Internet, can effectively replace declining geographic communities (<i>ibid</i>, p. 27). Social media has made humans more intricately connected than ever before, but recent <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/2012/05/is-facebook-making-us-lonely/8930/ ">research </a>apparently shows that we’re also lonelier than ever before, which is a public health issue. An Australian study also found a strong link between Facebook users and narcissism, manifested “in patterns of fantastic grandiosity [and] craving for attention.” <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiikIZ751Kt6PGT3gxE5p1OdicveSqF3XWYNcQNjeicIvcVZr8jjNaQIFXdR4yZb_T1mQOnG2D5fJAD4ZNgZMe-FHsH8QHmYAqXl1uN7IEoD6uhSoPhjs1i5UX3qM9Be_8pKWm8UrmxjnQ/s1600/Facebook+and+narcissism.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left:1em; margin-right:1em"><img border="0" height="215" width="234" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiikIZ751Kt6PGT3gxE5p1OdicveSqF3XWYNcQNjeicIvcVZr8jjNaQIFXdR4yZb_T1mQOnG2D5fJAD4ZNgZMe-FHsH8QHmYAqXl1uN7IEoD6uhSoPhjs1i5UX3qM9Be_8pKWm8UrmxjnQ/s320/Facebook+and+narcissism.jpg" /></a></div>And interestingly, narcissism is closely tied to loneliness. Online “communities” become projections of self-image, which then defines community as a retreat from “the messy reality of other people.” This is certainly not always the case, but we do meet fewer people and gather together less frequently. Proximity matters: where we live, who we live there with, and how we live there define our relationship to the world.<br />
<br />
Community must be narrowed to emphasize places and expanded to include nature. Therefore, I think it would be better, and more realistic, to say community is like, and part of, an <i>eco</i>system, which is mutable and resilient, inclusive, has permeable borders (Walter, p. 72), and is always adapting to context. In fact, place can be more inclusive than communities of interest because it encompasses multiple interest groups by something, or somewhere, held in common. And because of that they may realize that their best option for survival is learning to work together, and in “this way places breed cooperation” (Kemmis, p. 122). This kind of community does not spontaneously happen, because, as mentioned before, inhabiting means dwelling in a place in an intentionally practiced way (ibid, p. 79). Place is large enough to nurture pluralism but is small enough to restrain it (Myers, p. 364) from becoming another indiscriminate egalitarianism. The land itself is made healthy through biodiversity. This conception knows the always changing nature of community and place.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_hImYZkGdmxtN7-w0VGbLquzN4ORLVycicto5FLom86xPfdXreTykAL4J7geJR_jh_mj7Rj-W8v7Xx8cMYSN7RxpoLFBudRQkhmPVqDL16HUK87y0GHzgCsUN9MSDpRdHuQLuHMvVWBo/s1600/ecological.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left:1em; margin-right:1em"><img border="0" height="149" width="338" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_hImYZkGdmxtN7-w0VGbLquzN4ORLVycicto5FLom86xPfdXreTykAL4J7geJR_jh_mj7Rj-W8v7Xx8cMYSN7RxpoLFBudRQkhmPVqDL16HUK87y0GHzgCsUN9MSDpRdHuQLuHMvVWBo/s400/ecological.jpg" /></a></div>Which once again brings us to the question of democratic scale and limits. Community is like cells in the body and the body itself, which has limits but is always receiving and giving, just as ecosystems are always transformed by outside disturbance. In this understanding, there is potentially an organic household—that is, an ecosystem—which can contain the human and the nonhuman together (Kemmis, p. 120). I don’t think a radical democratic public is possible without some idea of community as an ecosystem, because “public life can only be reclaimed by understanding, and then practicing, its connection to real, identifiable places” in which citizens participate (<i>ibid</i>, p. 6). Perhaps, then, communities as ecosystems could help revive, or achieve, something like democracy. In a healthy durable place, diverse residents must learn to live well with their neighbors. Scholars as far back as Tocqueville “have emphasized the engagement of the community as a focal point of a healthy democracy” (Ohmer & DeMasi, p. 6), something which the Occupy Movement is trying to revision and reinvigorate. Understanding the relationship between community, democracy, and place does not ignore the reality of forced migration through violent displacement (<b>Footnote</b>). But displacement only highlights the importance of place in human imagination even more. We are always already somewhere. And, as Flannery O’Connor once wrote, somewhere is better than anywhere.<br />
<br />
Peacebuilder John Paul Lederach describes society as a House and the opposing theories of how to construct this House: top-down or bottom-up (p. 37). The blueprints of our House called for liberty and justice for all, but the foundation was poured with white supremacy, patriarchy, and oligarchy (Myers, p. 203). This House was built more by enslaved Africans than by free Europeans, and we evicted the previous inhabitants. Lederach’s opposing theories of social change lie at the heart of the debate about democracy and community. One approach believes social injustices are a personal and policy problem: the House needs some slight adjustments and some redecorating, but the structure is sound. The other approach thinks that these injustices stem from the very history and formations of economic and political structures themselves: the House cannot simply be repainted, but might be in need of extensive renovation. <br />
<br />
Because a House divided against itself cannot stand.<br />
<br />
<b>Footnote</b>: The Occupy movement has even experienced this.<br />
<br />
<br />
References<br />
<br />
Carr, M. (2004). <i>Bioregionalism and civil society: Democratic challenges to corporate globalism</i>. Vancouver: UBC Press.<br />
<br />
Graeber, D. (2004). <i>Fragments of an anarchist anthropology</i>. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. <br />
<br />
Kemmis, D. (1990). <i>Community and the politics of place</i>. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.<br />
<br />
Lederach, J. (1997). <i>Building peace: Sustainable reconciliation in divided societies</i>. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Institute of Peace.<br />
<br />
Minkler, M. and Wallerstein, N. (2004). Community Organization and Community Building: A Health Education Perspective. In M. Minkler (ed.), <i>Community organizing and community building for health</i> (pp. 30-52). New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.<br />
<br />
Myers. C. (1994). <i>Who will roll away the stone?: Discipleship queries for first world christians</i>. Maryknoll: Orbis Books.<br />
<br />
Ohmer, M. L. & DeMasi, K. (2009). <i>Consensus organizing: A community development <br />
workbook</i>. Los Angeles: SAGE Publications, Inc.<br />
<br />
Walter, C. L. (2004). Community building practice: A conceptual framework. In M. Minkler (ed.), <i>Community organizing and community building for health</i> (pp. 68-83). New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.Jonathan McRayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11320785725421810116noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2118802837677828648.post-64527562938422229422012-06-29T10:54:00.000-05:002012-07-01T15:14:08.307-05:00Proximity Matters: The Place of Democracy Part IIISocial change is, borrowing from James Joyce, a <i>chaosmos</i>, a tenuous order hinged on the contingency of flux. We can predict and prepare for it, we can leaven society to precipitate it, but ultimately social change belongs to the indeterminate future. For this reason, activists like those in the Occupy movement must be skilled readers of the unveiled signs of the time. <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbO9v1lhOILY7DJbElnUWUe3Ys8UzIlpG3KAG70HbooPSSED4rQG2ZkQ7yTTmQ9c_n8-Tcq5TC16lGquMD_CfYMVRbZav1I9otvT-PfRuu6KQRqx-eOcaKNwMgVDdnjY9nup5M3Ot9VAs/s1600/ripe+fruit.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear:left; float:left;margin-right:1em; margin-bottom:1em"><img border="0" height="240" width="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbO9v1lhOILY7DJbElnUWUe3Ys8UzIlpG3KAG70HbooPSSED4rQG2ZkQ7yTTmQ9c_n8-Tcq5TC16lGquMD_CfYMVRbZav1I9otvT-PfRuu6KQRqx-eOcaKNwMgVDdnjY9nup5M3Ot9VAs/s320/ripe+fruit.jpg" /></a></div><br />
Like knowing when to pluck ripe fruit gifted by the tree. And so social change requires an urgent energy but also a wild sort of patience, which implies committed time in a place, which implies community. Associations should come and go, but communities are meant to last. <br />
<br />
Engineer and activist Randy Schutt declares that we need a clear vision of a good society toward which we are moving (pp. 67-68). Because of this, activists need supportive community in order to live simply, animate social change for the long haul (<i>ibid</i>, pp. 72-3), and imagine what the alternative future looks like <i>right now</i>. At this point, Schutt is betraying (unacknowledged) anarchist values of revolution and organizing, such as ending oppression rather than individual oppressors, direct nonviolence, the commensurability of ends and means, and alternative institutions (<i>ibid</i>, pp. 64-68). Of course, alternative institutions should not be content to carve out enclaves within the current order, but should also challenge it because the top-level Metonyms don’t voluntarily modify. Nevertheless, regime change usually chops the head off the Hydra monster only so another biting head can grow in its place. Instead, the point of anarchism is direct democracy by building a new society in the shell of the old. And this is what movements like Occupy are trying to do.<br />
<br />
But let’s be clear: these movements are not the answer to our problems. They are not the beatific vision of democracy or community. In an essay called “In Distrust of Movements,” farmer and writer Wendell Berry complains that such movements are often insincere because they presume that other people cause all the problems and so require only policies, not behaviors, to be changed (2004, p. 45). He proposes three conditions for his participation in the Movement to Teach the Economy What It Is Doing, or the MTEWIID, a name which he hopes will be too clunky to be bumper-sticker trendy. Firstly, we must give up the belief in totalizing solutions (<i>ibid</i>, p. 49), which are often predicated on regime change (Graeber, 2011, p. 27). Secondly, we should acknowledge our complicity in the economic system, because in order to expose it we must understand how we participate in it, especially if we are going to build a good economy (Berry, 2004, pp. 49-50). Finally, we must be satisfied to be poor and so find cheap solutions within the reach of everybody, which will never happen if we have lots of money: “We want a movement that is a movement because it is advanced by all its members in their daily lives” (<i>ibid</i>, p. 50). <br />
<br />
In my experience and reading, many Occupy hubs are wrestling with these conditions. For instance, <a href="http://occupyhburg.wordpress.com/">Occupy Harrisonburg</a> in Virginia asserts that they are the articulation, not the solution, of the problem and that their mission is to: celebrate what works; acknowledge what is broken; take responsibility; create action; and repeat.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiv9x8QnyWFSsWP3hzTtsYjz7JrSSKqbkZSnLDvNmMFdwVSHwGHHz7baHgMhhwIZRLAnoRJB78YW8636whbaWfwnOpx1Vtk2E79FJdLuqMd1lkkeUzhh6oebnqhRzrw9h41NEHP3c_IHwI/s1600/OccupyHburg" imageanchor="1" style="clear:right; float:right; margin-left:1em; margin-bottom:1em"><img border="0" height="240" width="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiv9x8QnyWFSsWP3hzTtsYjz7JrSSKqbkZSnLDvNmMFdwVSHwGHHz7baHgMhhwIZRLAnoRJB78YW8636whbaWfwnOpx1Vtk2E79FJdLuqMd1lkkeUzhh6oebnqhRzrw9h41NEHP3c_IHwI/s320/OccupyHburg" /></a></div><br />
David Graeber argues that mass direct action organized as direct democracy is very effective, but the main problem with such movements is that they are shocked by quick successes and then thrown into confusion and infighting (2011, p. 12). Perhaps Berry’s conditions provide one way to avoid these perennial pitfalls, especially if we also come to terms with and repent of the dark American history of racism, militarism, and classism.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiV3vbnq5XRiAjQ-ImGZYsJvJxcEMoxy2MKXeVaxeGxSJeo1e6HfnL_alXcrMkUbjAHl6E6lhJHnU8BuYQ-_AMUa7LpvVG6GBV75Jn9claPzocr376Py-L8sx4r8wfODIWrbIsSRdmwXsU/s1600/occup-hburg.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left:1em; margin-right:1em"><img border="0" height="230" width="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiV3vbnq5XRiAjQ-ImGZYsJvJxcEMoxy2MKXeVaxeGxSJeo1e6HfnL_alXcrMkUbjAHl6E6lhJHnU8BuYQ-_AMUa7LpvVG6GBV75Jn9claPzocr376Py-L8sx4r8wfODIWrbIsSRdmwXsU/s320/occup-hburg.jpg" /></a></div><br />
<br />
Peacebuilders and activists stumble upon other related pitfalls, such as wanting to address root causes but not wanting to put down any roots. Transience breeds abstraction, around which the danger of global thinking revolves. Those with grand abstract schemes to “save the world” don’t always think that differently from those with grand abstract schemes to “take over the world.” Both operate on reductionist assumptions and the myth of the White Man’s Burden. Indeed, the most successful global thinkers have been imperial governments and multinational corporations (Berry, 1993, p. 19). I’m not proposing isolation, because justice necessitates imaginative respect for the plurality of the world’s places (<i>ibid</i>, p. 50). No place is wholly free while another is enslaved, no place wholly healed while another is diseased. <br />
<br />
However, I doubt whether global solutions will be any less destructive than the problems which they seek to solve. Contrary to popular belief, I think size does matter. The bigger they are the harder they will fall. This is not only a practical consideration, but an ethical one as well: who will suffer the consequences of bad decisions if, or when, the mighty walls come tumbling down? Unfortunately, scale and limits are not popular topics in industrial Western countries. The question of democratic scale transports us back to the Constitution’s drafting, where Federalists and republicans disagreed on proper scale but both used the wide western frontier to their advantage. <br />
<br />
Kirkpatrick Sale maintains that scale is “the single most critical and decisive determinant of all human constructs” (p. 54) because people are not usually persuaded by forceful moral argument but can be moved to right behavior when they see the problem before them and their connection to it, and this can only be done at a limited scale (<i>ibid</i>, p. 53). For something to be democratic, it seems to me that people at least need the option to interact with one another, to cross paths at least once in a while. Sale notes that humans evolved in villages mostly ranging from 500 to 1,000 people, with broader tribal associations rarely exceeding 10,000 (<i>ibid</i>, p. 64). Clearly network organizing across regions is necessary, much as the Iroquois Confederacy did or perhaps as 21st century town meetings are attempting to do now (Lukensmeyer & Brigham, 2005). However, these should supplement, not replace, actual town meetings. <br />
<br />
Deliberative democracy builds on and links more direct, scaled democracies. In a deliberative process, everyone affected by or interested in a decision should be invited to participate in the decision-making process (Evanoff, p. 24), which doesn’t mean everyone would convene at larger levels to discuss regional cooperation. Representative forms of democracy may be more efficient, or at least faster, but they tend to exclude those without access to power centers and, ever so slowly, representation becomes separation. But this doesn’t imply some bland uniformity. Sale argues that while alpha males and coercion are present in the nonhuman world, there is no institutionalized system of domination that could be called hierarchy (Sale, p. 98). However, we do see hetrarchy, or “<i>distinction without rank</i>,” that entails complementary roles (<i>ibid</i>, p. 98). After all, as Wendell Berry points out, a superficial egalitarianism is a free market society in which we won’t listen to those who may know more or we won’t help those whose conditions are worse (1993, p. 173). Equality without equity, compassion, or mutuality endorses power and wealth (<i>ibid</i>, p. 172). Berry insists that a deep pluralism demands, not an indiscriminate egalitarianism or shallow tolerance, but knowledge and respect of differences, which implies imagination, or “the ability to see one another, across our inevitable differences, as living souls.” (<i>ibid</i>, p. 173). <br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWPDYUYW8hr7siimPUgzv-mtkgNp4195EKMG0wio0aeSSqtRlHuP48wOM7XDMgIJ6M-fvEPRWg7JWPECSBy-hs7bp20dL5FqpytSCYtyie8kkcO_xVzDmBMD8vIQLEqLd9PwYkvsT3Y04/s1600/hburgoccupy1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left:1em; margin-right:1em"><img border="0" height="214" width="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWPDYUYW8hr7siimPUgzv-mtkgNp4195EKMG0wio0aeSSqtRlHuP48wOM7XDMgIJ6M-fvEPRWg7JWPECSBy-hs7bp20dL5FqpytSCYtyie8kkcO_xVzDmBMD8vIQLEqLd9PwYkvsT3Y04/s320/hburgoccupy1.jpg" /></a></div><br />
<br />
A democratic confederal model, like bioregionalism, moves toward this knowledgeable respect and imagination, asserting that convergence is necessary for cultures to address shared problems, but divergence is also needed to ensure cultural diversity and evolution (Evanoff, p. 1). This decentralized network, like ecological trophic levels or nutrient cycles, is one way to prevent insularity. While parochialism is an undoubted risk, it is also a regular red herring in discussions of communities and local democracies, no more endemic to them than to urban centers and nation-states, evidenced by the rampant anti-immigration rhetoric in the U.S. <br />
<br />
<br />
References<br />
<br />
Berry, W. (2004). <i>Citizenship papers</i>. Washington, DC: Shoemaker & Hoard. <br />
(1993). <i>Sex, economy, freedom, and community: Eight essays</i>. New York City: <br />
Pantheon Books.<br />
<br />
Evanoff, R. (2011). <i>Bioregionalism and global ethics: A transactional approach to achieving ecological sustainability, social justice, and human well-being</i>. New York: Routledge. <br />
<br />
Graeber, D. (2011). <i>Revolutions in reverse: Essays on politics, violence, art, and the imagination</i>. New York: Autonomedia. <br />
<br />
Lukensmeyer, C. J. & Brigham, S. (2005). Taking democracy to scale: Large scale interventions—for citizens. <i>Journal of Applied Behavioral Science</i>, 41, 47-60.<br />
<br />
Sale, K. (2000). <i>Dwellers in the land: The bioregional vision</i>. Athens: University of Georgia Press.<br />
<br />
Schutt, R. (2001). <i>Inciting democracy: A practical proposal for creating a good society</i>. Cleveland: Spring Forward Press.Jonathan McRayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11320785725421810116noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2118802837677828648.post-26658963799591894082012-06-27T10:44:00.002-05:002012-06-27T10:45:22.904-05:00Proximity Matters: The Place of Democracy Part II<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwM8V7x7XrOHEBcKO9lmssAn0hdVEkBXfnvV-I3qgGvTgY1If7xSRhXpid4MLwX0OLtBh6cXD8T7d1gAV03ZOSOEGfA23zgnuxPw634REcpYi8EirfHB1A5f5vIhYvNPChgFBb5vFMDSo/s1600/voting-booth.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear:left; float:left;margin-right:1em; margin-bottom:1em"><img border="0" height="320" width="261" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwM8V7x7XrOHEBcKO9lmssAn0hdVEkBXfnvV-I3qgGvTgY1If7xSRhXpid4MLwX0OLtBh6cXD8T7d1gAV03ZOSOEGfA23zgnuxPw634REcpYi8EirfHB1A5f5vIhYvNPChgFBb5vFMDSo/s320/voting-booth.png" /></a></div><br />
In any case, defining democracy as voting—a fairly recent historical classification—smells like Eurocentrism. The United States is a majoritarian democracy, a military institution descended from ancient Greece (Graeber, 2004, p. 87). This democratic structure is only possible when a society believes people should have an equal say in decision-making <i>and </i>when a coercive legal apparatus is able to enforce those decisions (<i>ibid</i>, p. 89). Consensus decision-making was the necessary norm in many societies without a coercive apparatus, but many Western scholars don’t designate an indigenous village council as democratic because they don’t vote (<i>ibid</i>, p. 88). It does seem relevant that the U.S. democracy-as-voting system originated in ancient Greece, which was one of history’s most competitive societies in which public decision-making was a form of contest within a populace at arms (<i>ibid</i>, p. 90), an idea we see expressed in the U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment. As we should recall, democracy etymologically refers to the force or violence of the people—<i>kratos</i>, not <i>archos</i>—because the political elites that devised the word did not see a huge difference between democracy and mob rule (<i>ibid</i>, p. 91). <br />
<br />
Even so, democracy is a strange spectrum and a word in reclamation. Many progressives involved with Occupy declare that this new movement is about reclaiming our bought democracy, perhaps agreeing with Cornel West that citizen disillusionment is due to free-market fundamentalism, aggressive militarism, and escalating authoritarianism (pp. 3-6). Occupiers are not the only ones noting the challenge of reclaiming democracy. Some believe that we must rebuild the nation’s moral foundation because an emphasis on individual rights has made us self-absorbed (Wharton, p. 3). Others argue that reinventing citizenship necessitates a web of connections because democracy is the habit of working together (<i>ibid</i>, p. 5) . And still others bemoan that citizens have lost control of a government that is supposedly of, by, and for the people (<i>ibid</i>, p. 7). Our work is indeed cut out for us because this trend may trace back to the defeat of the agrarian Populist movement in the 1896 presidential campaign. William McKinley’s victory marks the first time in which big money and mass communication became central ingredients in American politics (Kemmis, p. 29). Daniel Kemmis, Montana lawyer and former mayor of Missoula, probably agrees with each of the above challenges to varying degrees, especially since the embodied habit of working together implies certain moral values, but he suggests that democratic deterioration might go back even further than McKinley. In fact, it may go back to the drafting of the U.S. Constitution. <br />
<br />
The Founding Fathers famously debated balancing the interests of slave and free states and small and large states, but they also disputed whether citizens could solve problems together or if elaborate government machinery was necessary to resolve conflict without direct democratic engagement (<i>ibid</i>, p. 11). The republican tradition, championed by Thomas Jefferson, depended on people working together to pursue a common good (barring, of course, everyone except white land-owning men). The Federalists, such as James Madison, opposed this with two alternatives: checks and balances in a procedural republic and the extensive western frontier (<i>ibid</i>, pp. 12-13). The Federalist argument rejected the possibility of citizens working together because individuals could only pursue their own private interests, so the effective role of government would be to channel vices toward some emergent higher good (<i>ibid</i>, pp. 14-15), which replaces direct encounters between conflicting parties (<i>ibid</i>, p. 56). The procedural republic’s checks and balances functioned much like the invisible hand of the market, which may explain why capitalism has followed democracy everywhere like a dog chasing its tail. Kemmis argues that this is no accident since the Federalists were also interested “in creating optimal conditions for an expanding commercial and industrial economy”: Adam Smith introduced the invisible hand into economics and James Madison introduced it into politics (<i>ibid</i>, p. 15). <br />
<br />
Because of this, the Federalists advocated a much larger political scale than traditional republican teaching, which needed governance small enough that proximate citizens could actually know and repeatedly engage with the ‘public thing’ (<i>ibid</i>, p. 16), something which Alexis de Tocqueville did in fact witness. This outsider also witnessed something rotten in the state of America: a despotic cocktail of racism, empire, and democracy that could undermine what he saw as good (West, p. 45). But Madison saw expanding the western frontier as a hedge against the tyranny of a majority finding a common motive (Kemmis, p. 17) which could foment the aforementioned mob rule; the frontier then became a way of keeping citizens apart (<b>Footnote</b>), even as Jefferson naively believed colonization would preserve republican values through the promise of continual fertile land (<i>ibid</i>, p. 19). As the frontier inevitably closed, two new escape valves saved citizens from finally facing one another: extra-continental imperialism and the regulatory bureaucracy (<i>ibid</i>, p. 32). Since then, these two escape valves have been consistent features of American political life.<br />
<br />
Maybe Timothy Zick is <a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/03/20123185220379942.html">right </a>that the Occupy movement aims to redeem rather than achieve democracy, but this would depend entirely on how we want to define democracy and how we interpret our past. Either way, the intended outcome may be a democracy quite different than the one envisioned by the U.S. founding fathers, and we should allow for the possibility that whatever comes may not even be called democracy. And we must always be ready to challenge whatever comes. As biologist Mary Clark says, “In the United States, the centralized, ‘weak’ democracy that the Federalists put in place – with the professed intention of discouraging ordinary people from serious political engagement – needs to be turned into highly participatory, ‘strong,’ community democracies that give people back a sense of control over their own lives” (p. 395). The Occupy movement is attempting to redeem or achieve this democratic public through general assemblies in neighborhoods parks and city squares, operating on the assumption that citizenship is not allegiance to an abstract state but is the repeated practice of communal decision-making, and this requires some common place in which to share experiences (Wharton, p. 5). <br />
<br />
One challenge of democracy is that associations, though they still exist in the United States, often relinquish their connection to creation, education, mutual aid, and health to the market and the state (Cavanaugh, p. 258). Kemmis compares contemporary public life to a Big Mac, which can exist in the same form anywhere as a placeless abstraction that diminishes the possibility for culture (p. 7). Or perhaps public life is now like Taco Bell commercials, which market products by fabricating contexts like a small Hispanic neighborhood, in order to have some semblance of cultural identity. For Kemmis, public life simply isn’t possible unless people are trying to inhabit a place together through practiced embodied patterns like work and play, celebration and mourning (<i>ibid</i>, pp. 79-80).<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqfHcnBsB9nRde_HaTV1IU4znCENNlvEVpmMUOd5UrCiWVJSWDgHBLTuMFHOJXRnLP3NdN0mVw3O3rfGzzwoiji7aEwGqM5o8RolY8la0VvPDS8UYoYel84ArUpkhE7wCwCEoTiI6gVFs/s1600/us+constitution.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left:1em; margin-right:1em"><img border="0" height="212" width="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqfHcnBsB9nRde_HaTV1IU4znCENNlvEVpmMUOd5UrCiWVJSWDgHBLTuMFHOJXRnLP3NdN0mVw3O3rfGzzwoiji7aEwGqM5o8RolY8la0VvPDS8UYoYel84ArUpkhE7wCwCEoTiI6gVFs/s320/us+constitution.jpg" /></a></div><br />
Kemmis drives this argument home by comparing the preambles of the U.S. and Montana constitutions. At first glance, they are similar, beginning with “We the people” and ending in the intention to “ordain and establish.” But Montanans took a lengthy pause between these phrases to thank God for the beauty and majesty of the mountains and valleys, dedicating themselves to preserving this heritage for themselves and future generations (ibid, p. 4). This is not rhetorical flourish, Kemmis contends, but instead signifies a different orientation to governance than the U.S. Constitution: the authors’ relation to the place helped inform what they meant by “we the people,” because people “in their separated individuality never become public. They only do that by a deliberate act of constituting themselves as ‘the people’” (<i>ibid</i>, p. 4). The tangibility of the place delivers the potential for this common effort.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSn7xGIvl-I7tKZDNdJSm2zycCjLTPfXMbeU0cz8FvqHmwoGWItYwOIxejRG6bVDf1ypFDODg5F2oJ5OaJYsAbJL4AbQ_qvnCb5ZbX16KjvtoKHm3YuUimJdK9V01Kh7-PAdnxQSLnoxg/s1600/1115-Occupy-Zuccotti_full_600.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear:left; float:left;margin-right:1em; margin-bottom:1em"><img border="0" height="214" width="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSn7xGIvl-I7tKZDNdJSm2zycCjLTPfXMbeU0cz8FvqHmwoGWItYwOIxejRG6bVDf1ypFDODg5F2oJ5OaJYsAbJL4AbQ_qvnCb5ZbX16KjvtoKHm3YuUimJdK9V01Kh7-PAdnxQSLnoxg/s320/1115-Occupy-Zuccotti_full_600.jpg" /></a></div><br />
Perhaps the Occupy movement is recognizing this. In fact, journalist Arun Gupta <a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/05/2012521151225452634.html">believes </a>that this very concreteness troubles the capitalist system, which congregates “workers in a common space – the factory – where they become aware of their common interests, as well as their potential power to stop the machinery of capital,” just as educational space for student movements and black churches during the civil rights movement provided the same locus. Transforming Zuccotti Park on Wall Street into political space manifests this insight. Diverse people felt drawn to a reimagined commons in which a multitude exchanged food, music, ideas, shelter, skills, and much more. Because of this, longtime organizers were surprised by deep conversations between ideological opponents. Gupta visited approximately forty different U.S. occupations and met many Republicans, and a few Tea Partiers, who self-identified as the 99%. The ability to reconfigure space through acts of reinhabitation is crucial to the Occupy movement’s success, because inhabiting a place means dwelling there in an intentionally practiced way (Kemmis, p. 79). Unfortunately, many Americans have lost the ability to relate to their neighbors, especially ones with contrasting ideas and lifestyles (<i>ibid</i>, p. 79), because some surveys report that 75% of Americans don’t know their next-door neighbors (McKibben, p. 117). American transience through work, housing, finance, and virtual spaces hides the <a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/05/2012521151225452634.html">insight </a>that “taking collective action in a shared physical space is how social change happens from below."<br />
<br />
<b>Footnote</b>: “Every colonial and autocratic regime rises to power by turning citizens against each other” (Block, p. 71).<br />
<br />
References<br />
<br />
Block, P. (2009). <i>Community: The structure of belonging</i>. San Francisco: Berret-Koehler Publishers, Inc.<br />
<br />
Clark, M. E. (2002). <i>In search of human nature</i>. New York: Routledge. <br />
<br />
Graeber, D. (2004). <i>Fragments of an anarchist anthropology</i>. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.<br />
<br />
Kemmis, D. (1990). <i>Community and the politics of place</i>. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.<br />
<br />
McKibben, B. (2007). <i>Deep economy: The wealth of communities and the durable future</i>. New York City: Henry Holt and Company.<br />
<br />
West, C. (2004). <i>Democracy matters: Winning the fight against imperialism</i>. New York: Penguin Books.<br />
<br />
Wharton, T. (2006). <i>Democracy’s challenge: Reclaiming the public’s role</i>. Dayton: National Issues Forums Institute.Jonathan McRayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11320785725421810116noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2118802837677828648.post-26269956356301012712012-06-25T21:57:00.000-05:002012-06-25T21:57:55.134-05:00Proximity Matters: The Place of Democracy Part I<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"></div>“Do unto those downstream as you would have those upstream do unto you.”<br />
-Wendell Berry, “Watershed and Commonwealth” (2004, p. 135)<br />
<br />
In a recent Al Jazeera <a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/03/20123185220379942.html ">article</a>, law professor Timothy Zick makes a sharp distinction between the Arab Spring and the Occupy movement. The former, he claims, is about achieving democracy while the latter attempts to redeem an existing democratic system. Zick argues that street protests can be effective, but the Occupy movement must eventually grow out of direct action and darken the doorways of legitimate institutions to make actual lasting change. The Occupy movement’s challenge will be to maintain its democratic principles while at the same time entering the bloodstream of governmental agencies because, Zick claims, public protest is needed but systemic change demands traditional forums as the primary modus operandi.<br />
<br />
Zick’s statist optimism is also apparent when he implies that other notable democratic movements emerged because they were within established democracies. I wonder how he then explains Indian independence under the British empire, People Power in the Philippines, nonviolent Latin American movements such as the Chilean effort to oust Pinochet, and of course Denmark’s resistance to Nazi occupation. The U.S. civil rights movement did occur in a country claiming democratic values, but those values were certainly not favoring the protesters. <br />
<br />
Zick’s argument seems fairly standard amongst American liberals who may support democratic protests but ultimately believe that real democracy is instantiated in formal legal structures. Policy professor Peter Dreier <a href="http://comm-org.wisc.edu/papers2009/dreier.htm">agrees</a>, asking aloud if Obama’s election was simply a liberal interim period or if it signals a major progressive shift in U.S. politics. Dreier sees Obama’s electoral campaign as a grassroots social movement that reconnected the people to the power, indirectly comparing this campaign to abolitionism and Populist farmers, housing and health reformers, suffragists and labor unionists, civil rights and environmental activism. Obama did hire hundreds of grassroots organizations and the statistics of support among minorities, students, and labor unions are extremely impressive (ibid, p. 5). Dreier attributes much of the campaign’s success to such grassroots organizing on Obama’s behalf, and his optimism for this “new era” is very evident.<br />
<br />
Dreier emphasizes that shrewd elected officials will know that they depend on radical protesters to ripen the political landscape, leveraging such situations so that officials will appear moderate when building bridges. Practical protesters should also recognize that while legislation is usually a compromise, it could lead to progressive reform. The upcoming presidential election between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney is <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/jun/09/why-2012-matters/">portrayed </a>as a cataclysmic turning point in U.S. history that requires Dreier’s pragmatism. Democrats accuse more radical activists of playing into the plutocracy’s hands by refusing to vote for the lesser of two evils. For liberals, the only thing worse than voting in partisan politics is not voting in them. <br />
<br />
Obama’s rhetoric and certain policies are indeed better, but Glenn Greenwald <a href="http://www.salon.com/2012/02/08/repulsive_progressive_hypocrisy/singleton/ ">contends </a>that liberals now support policies they claimed to abhor under Bush, such as maintaining Guantanamo Bay, targeting citizens without due process, and extensive drone attacks. In fact, 77% of liberal Democrats support Obama’s use of drones, representing what Greenwald calls repulsive progressive hypocrisy. Not to mention that Obama extensively fundraised from Wall Street corporations (and later bailed them out), intensified the war in Afghanistan, and recently <a href="http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/05/18-3 ">teamed </a>up with agribusiness giants to sow GMOs throughout Africa, even though the Regional Consultation of Civil Society for Africa <a href="http://kofic.s3.amazonaws.com/126/2251/African-Civil-Society-Declaration.pdf">responded </a>that this current plan will not support family farms constituting actual “African food security and sovereignty” (<b>Footnote</b>). Greenwald’s article exposes Dreier’s comparison of Obama’s campaign with American liberation movements: once Obama entered the Oval Office, on the waves of grassroots organizing, he was in control of a vast military empire centralized in D.C., far away from the dissipating associations that formed around his inspiring speeches. In a recent conversation with a classmate, I criticized Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize speech in which he suggested that King and Gandhi’s nonviolence was not naïve . . . but it was of course a <i>little </i>naïve. My classmate defended Obama because he has different job requirements than King or Gandhi. But excusing the president based simply on his job description doesn’t make me ignore his actions. It makes me question the job itself.<br />
<br />
Perhaps subversive voting could be a tactic for radicals among a wider strategy of constructive programs. Policies surely require change now in order to limit damage, and we cannot escape constant collaboration and points of intersection, even as we guard against overwhelming centripetal force. But voting is often viewed as the heart of liberal state democracy, which has become the West’s greatest assembly-lined export. Anthropologist David Graeber quips that the West certainly didn’t invent democracy, but they did spend “several hundred years invading and spreading democracy to people who were practicing democracy for thousands of years and were told to cut it out” (2004, p. 93). As Cornel West reminds us, slavery and expulsion of indigenous people are historical preconditions to American democracy, and in fact there “could be no such thing as an experiment in American democracy without these racist and imperial foundations” (p. 45). <br />
<br />
And yet for some reason, state democracy is still presented as a social contract that prevents widespread violence. However, many historians now claim that state-making has served, not to protect people from violence as Thomas Hobbes supposed, but to organize for the purpose of war (Cavanaugh, p. 250). Rather than paving the way for the world community, nation-states disintegrated communities through their absorption (<i>ibid</i>, p. 249). European peasants staged major popular rebellions, causing some of the most tumultuous periods in European history, during the infancy of the nation-state when royal leaders consolidated power through uniform language, currency, and taxes over huge territories (<i>ibid</i>, pp. 248-249). In a way, the Occupy movement is resisting similar trends within liberal democracy, which bifurcates the political and economic systems in which the supposed equality of the former actually supports structural inequality in the latter (Myers, p. 294). Many Americans, even poor Americans, seem to accept this division and so forfeit economic or political transformation because Horatio Algers’ bootstrap tales are still pervasive.<br />
<br />
Design consultant Peter Block argues that defining democratic engagement by voting effectively reduces citizens to consumers giving their power away (p. 64). In this case, national elections can actually prohibit democracy. For <a href="http://www.jesusradicals.com/the-myth-of-the-state-as-savior-and-elections-as-confession-of-faith/ ">instance</a>, voter registration and civil disobedience among African Americans rose dramatically during the 1960s, during which time Congress approved numerous legislation in favor of black communities. Voter registration continued to increase in the next decade, but civil disobedience diminished. The U.S. government then decelerated ratifying new laws favorable to African Americans, and, of course, Nixon’s War on Drugs also began during this period. Furthermore, congressmen and senators wanted the voting age lowered to 18 in order to draw students away from direct action during the Vietnam War; Senator Jacob Javits believed that anti-war organizers would be ineffective if young people had a role in the political process, which could channel student energy in carrot-and-stick fashion. Perhaps more disturbingly, David Graeber thinks such diversion is not atypical when it comes to democratic movements. Because the U.S. military is always mobilized for war, the government can instigate violence overseas which immediately distracts domestic social movements (2011, p. 15). Graeber speculates that it might not be a coincidence that the civil rights movement led to new legislation <i>and </i>acceleration of the Vietnam War; or that the anti-nuclear movement led to forsaking nuclear power <i>and </i>intensification of the Cold War, as well as incursions into Afghanistan and Central America; or that the global justice movement led to the collapse of the Washington consensus on neoliberalism <i>and </i>the War on Terror (<i>ibid</i>, pp. 15-16). At the risk of sounding like Mel Gibson in <i>Conspiracy Theory</i>, I wonder aloud if the Occupy movement will be sidetracked by further <a href="http://www.nationofchange.org/congress-pushes-war-iran-1339854484 ">threats </a>of war with Iran.<br />
<br />
<b>Footnote</b>: This consultation included “small-scale farmers, pastoralists, fisherfolk, consumers, women, young people, NGOs, human rights movements, trade unions, academics, artisans, [and] indigenous peoples”; in short, the people who Obama, Monsanto, Cargill, DuPont, and others claim to be helping.<br />
<br />
References<br />
<br />
Block, P. (2009). <i>Community: The structure of belonging</i>. San Francisco: Berret-Koehler <br />
Publishers, Inc.<br />
<br />
Cavanaugh, W. (2004). <i>Killing for the telephone company: Why the nation-state is not the keeper of the common good</i>. Modern Theology, 20, 243-274.<br />
<br />
Graeber, D. (2004). <i>Fragments of an anarchist anthropology</i>. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.<br />
(2011). <i>Revolutions in reverse: Essays on politics, violence, art, and the imagination</i>. New York: Autonomedia.<br />
<br />
Myers. C. (1994). <i>Who will roll away the stone?: Discipleship queries for first world <br />
christians</i>. Maryknoll: Orbis Books.<br />
<br />
West, C. (2004). <i>Democracy matters: Winning the fight against imperialism</i>. New York: Penguin Books.Jonathan McRayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11320785725421810116noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2118802837677828648.post-9897126532006153322012-05-10T13:44:00.000-05:002012-05-10T13:44:30.526-05:00Social Change and Community OrganizingSocial change is, borrowing from James Joyce, a <i>chaosmos</i>, a tenuous order hinged on the contingency of flux. We can predict and prepare for it, we can leaven society to precipitate it, but ultimately social change belongs to the indeterminate future. For this reason, activists must be skilled readers of the unveiled signs of the time. Like knowing when to pluck ripe fruit gifted by the tree. And so social change requires a wild sort of patience and an urgent energy. Schutt’s chapter emphasizes similar themes like the longevity of such work (Schutt, 2001, p. 73) through long-term change (<i>ibid</i>, p. 62; Lederach, 1997, p. 78), which implies committed time in a place, which implies community. Associations should come and go, but communities are meant to last. <br />
<br />
Schutt declares that we need a clear vision of a good society toward which we are moving (Schutt, 2001, pp. 67-68), with which Lederach agrees (<i>ibid</i>. pp. 76-7). However, prefigurative politics figure little in Lederach’s analysis. While I am partial to grassroots and middle-range change (<i>ibid</i>, p. 39), I also recognize that policies must be altered to limit the current damage. But I do think most policy reforms resulted from community organizing and social movements by the most disenfranchised, whether it be civil rights, unemployment benefits, health and safety standards, food and drug regulations, and fair housing statutes (Myers, 1994, p. 218). I don’t think the top-level Metonyms voluntarily change, and cooptation through overwhelming centripetal force is a clear and present danger. Proximity matters: where we live, who we live there with, and how we live there define our relationship to the world.<br />
<br />
Because of this, I think Schutt is absolutely right: activists need supportive community in order to live simply, animate social change for the long haul (Schutt, 2001, pp. 72-3), and imagine what the alternative future looks like right now. I deeply resonate with the (unacknowledged) anarchist values of revolution and organizing undergirding Inciting Democracy, such as ending oppression rather than individual oppressors, direct nonviolence, alternative institutions, and the commensurability of ends and means (<i>ibid</i>, pp. 64-68). Regime change usually chops the head off the Hydra monster only so another biting head can grow in its place (<i>ibid</i>, pp. 59-60). Instead, the point of anarchism is radical and direct democracy by building a new society in the shell of the old. <br />
<br />
As such, I think collaborative modes of organizing that emphasize community strengths, desires (Minkler & Wallerstein, 2004, p. 35), and conscientization (<i>ibid</i>, p. 41; Walter, 2004, p. 71) are critical. However, social change necessitates the creative disturbance of conflict: structural violence must be confronted through direct action that balances power (ibid, p. 32). I think confrontational tactics belong within a larger constructive program that welcomes the possible conversion of oppressors. In this way, an aspirational vision is embodied that simultaneously exposes and challenges root causes.<br />
<br />
Sometimes peacebuilders want to address root causes but don’t want to put down roots. Transience breeds abstraction, around which global thinking revolves. Those with grand abstract schemes to “save the world” don’t always think that differently from those with grand abstract schemes to “take over the world.” Both operate on reductionist assumptions and the myth of the White Man’s Burden. Indeed, the most successful global thinkers have been imperial governments and multinational corporations (Berry, 1993, p. 19). I’m not proposing isolation, because justice necessitates imaginative respect for the plurality of the world’s places (<i>ibid</i>, p. 50). No place is wholly free while another is enslaved, no place wholly healed while another is diseased. However, I doubt whether global solutions will be any less destructive than the problems which they seek to solve. Contrary to popular belief, I think size does matter.<br />
<br />
I grew up in the Appalachian Mountains of East Tennessee, where my father was a family doctor with a non-profit healthcare center, community hospital, and rural clinics. I worked as a journalist and with nonviolent direct action campaigns in occupied Palestine, as well as a center for developmentally disabled youth and a reconciliation organization, for which I wrote a book about encounters with the other. I also worked with a community resource center and organic farm in Mozambique. And I am increasingly convicted by the gifts and needs of my own homeland. I am convicted by the praxis of community, which is vital to restorative justice and conflict transformation. I am currently exploring the intersections of restorative justice with permaculture and bioregionalism; the concepts and tools of community organizing hold tremendous potential for such work. My wife is studying in James Madison University’s Physician Assistant program and we, with a close group of friends as an intentional community, hope to engage in radical healthcare (<a href="http://www.rockdovecollective.com">www.rockdovecollective.com</a>), urban and rural permaculture farming, and an education center around restorative justice, ecological renewal, and local economies. Intentional community should represent a healthy microcosm of the larger community in which it is situated and be defined by its relatedness to that broader community. It therefore intentionally enacts on a smaller and intimate scale what it aids its context in transitioning to on a broader regional scale.<br />
<br />
Community is inevitable if we understand humans as social creatures dependent for better and worse on lives beyond ourselves. However, community is often without a livable definition by being reduced to “conversations of shared interest.” Shared interests and ideas are valuable, but they are fleeting and can divide neighbor from neighbor based solely on cognitive affiliations. Different ideas ensure critical thought and even reinforce one another, especially since we always live and work with people with whom we vehemently disagree and yet consider them friends, lovers, and colleagues (Graeber, 2004, pp. 8-9).<br />
<br />
Because of this, I respectfully quibble with Cheryl Walter, to whom community is “an inclusive, complex, and dynamic system, of which we are a part” (Walter, 2004, p. 69). To clarify, I agree with this, as well as her community building principles (ibid, p. 82) and her admission that community happens in context (ibid, p. 72). However, her existing definition too easily leads to expressions like the “online community” or the “global community,” which may appreciate interconnectedness but also dilute, or delude, community of any bioregional emphasis, local mutuality, and ultimately inter<i>dependence</i>. And so community ironically remains individualistic: we are connected so long as nothing is required of us. <br />
<br />
Walter suggests that community has no structure (<i>ibid</i>, p. 74) and unnecessarily dichotomizes social/demographic community from multidimensional/dynamic community (<i>ibid</i>, p. 70). A process-structure concept, which is an adaptable dynamic process that maintains form without rigidity over time (Lederach, 1997, p. 84), accommodates both. Community is a multidimensional system, but I think Walter’s attempt to encompass all forms of relationship as community makes places vulnerable to extractive market forces and therefore homogenization. She short shrift the notion of the commons, as well as to the crucial role of trust and partnership in community (Walter, 2004, pp. 80-1). And her definition, like many others, is anthropocentric. We cannot, as some assume, divorce ecological and social systems (Minkler & Wallerstein, 2004, p. 33). Community must be narrowed to emphasize places and expanded to include nature. Therefore, I think it would be better, and more realistic, to say community is like, and part of, an <i>eco</i>system, which is mutable and stable, inclusive, and has permeable borders (Walter, 2005, p. 72). This conception knows the always changing nature of community and place. Similarly, community is like cells in the body and the body itself, which has limits but is always receiving and giving. I don’t think Schutt’s vision of a radical democratic public is possible without community-as-ecosystem. Daniel Kemmis asserts that “public life can only be reclaimed by understanding, and then practicing, its connection to real, identifiable places” in which citizens participate (Kemmis, 1990, p. 6). This is why I think we should make a distinction between <i>communities </i>and <i>networks</i>.<br />
<br />
<br />
References<br />
<br />
Berry, W. (1993). <i>Sex, economy, freedom, and community: Eight essays</i>. New York City: Pantheon Books.<br />
<br />
Graeber, D. (2004). <i>Fragments of an anarchist anthropology</i>. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.<br />
<br />
Kemmis, D. (1990). <i>Community and the politics of place</i>. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.<br />
<br />
Lederach, J. (1997). <i>Building peace: Sustainable reconciliation in divided societies</i>. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Institute of Peace.<br />
<br />
Minkler, M. and Wallerstein, N. (2004). Community Organization and Community Building: A Health Education Perspective. In M. Minkler (ed.), <i>Community organizing and community building for health </i>(pp. 30-52). New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.<br />
<br />
Myers. C. (1994). <i>Who will roll away the stone?: Discipleship queries for first world christians</i>. Maryknoll: Orbis Books.<br />
<br />
Schutt, R. (2001). <i>Inciting democracy: A practical proposal for creating a good society</i>. Cleveland: Spring Forward Press.<br />
<br />
Walter, C. L. (2004). Community building practice: A conceptual framework. In M. Minkler <br />
(ed.), <i>Community organizing and community building for health </i>(pp. 68-83). New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.Jonathan McRayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11320785725421810116noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2118802837677828648.post-37290456585742737222012-02-17T10:04:00.005-06:002012-04-04T16:48:36.027-05:00Religion and Roots: The Danger of a Monolithic Story Part IIContexts such as this are key, and for me so is etymology. I am drawn to the fact that in Greek, Hebrew, and, to a certain extent, Latin, spirit and wind and breath (<em>nouma</em>, <em>ruach</em>, <em>spiritus</em>) are the same. When people said one, they said all three. This wordplay retains awe for flux and a reverence for mystery, holding both the fragility and resilience of life. In Latin, religion can mean either “to gather around again” (<em>re-legere</em>) or to “bind back to” (<em>re-ligare</em>). In this sense, many things become extremely religious (see <strong>Footnote</strong>) and the dividing walls of hostility constructed between groups begin to look foundationally weak. Because of this I try to entertain different definitions: I don’t want all my eggs in one basket.<br /> <br />Another definition is that religions are embodied cultural-linguistic traditions. As such, there is nothing I can do about the influence various forms of Christianities have had on me. They have informed me and shaped my language and my being, and ultimately my becoming. During a particularly antagonistic existential sojourn, the words of Wendell Berry unsettled, and continually unsettle, me:<br /> <br />“[T]here are an enormous number of people—and I am one of them—whose native religion, for better or worse, is Christianity. We were born to it; we began to learn about it before we became conscious; it is, whatever we think of it, an intimate belonging of our being; it informs our consciousness, our language, and our dreams. We can turn away from it or against it, but that will only bind us tightly to a reduced version of it. A better possibility is that this, our native religion, should survive and renew itself so that it may become as largely and truly instructive as we need it to be” (Berry, 1993, pp. 95-96).<br /> <br />In response, I must admit that the the Torah, the prophets, the gospels, and the epistles (not to mention the long winding history and tradition afterward) are my home in more ways than one. Whatever else they are, these stories are a reservoir of human folly and wisdom, empire and creation wrestling in concert throughout the ages. This has nothing to do with the rabbit-holes of Absolute Truth and Direct Revelation. In my mind, declaring that there is one true religion is akin to claiming that there is one true and absolute place, language, poem, painting, or musical composition. Some are certainly better composed than others, and gardens are better than garbage dumps, but nothing is that exclusively absolute.<br /><br />Let me tell an inadequate story in the manner of Jesus’ agroecological parables in the gospel of Mark: Christian history and tradition is like a great farm, which grew out of the influences of even more ancient agroecosystems. At times, the farm has exponentially expanded as the most dominant farmers fought and stole arable land and workers from neighboring farms; they would indeed incorporate techniques and knowledge from the conquered farm into their own, but often at the cost of the death of the conquered. Much of the land has been abused and scarred with destructive methods that took little notice of contours, watersheds, and past practices, all in the name of Maximizing Profits. But over in the many marginal spaces, the minority reports have been busy all along cultivating the fertility and fecundity of the topsoil, embracing biodiversity, conversing with neighboring farmers, and producing good fruit. Many of these marginal gardeners left throughout the years, believing the soil to be poisoned beyond remediation and the abuses of the farm calling for indefinite trials of separation. However, many stay, not because they agree with the dominant farmers or because they think their farming is the only way in which to care for the land. They stay because they feel health and memory in the soil, because they taste some good fruit, and because they learned their marginal practices on that land in the first place. If all the marginal gardeners left, the farm would decay into absolute ruin and they would simply have to squat on another farm just as conflicted as the one they left. <br /><br />I still wrestle with which kind of farmer I am in this tale. I do know that I am committed to radical hermeneutics (to borrow from John Caputo) and radical discipleship (to borrow from Ched Myers). The former deconstructs our stories by exposing their utter contingency: “God” is a cultural and historical construct shaped over time. The latter is caught up in the poetics of story, digging to the roots of our socioeconomic crises by dwelling within the roots of our stories: “God” is the wild <em>ruach </em>that in the naming refuses to be named. Because in the end stories are all we have, all that gives us shelter and all that drives us out into the cold. We are sustained and subverted by our stories in their contingent reality. Radical hermeneutics recognizes that <em>God </em>and <em>love </em>are endlessly translatable: “Is love a way of exemplifying <em>God </em>or is God a way of exemplifying <em>love</em>?” (Caputo, 2001, p. 25) However, radical hermeneutics agrees with radical discipleship that perhaps this is the wrong place to look for any sort of translation. The only translation that matters is our translation into the language of action and the movements of love. Religions are also related through this translatability: something is always lost in translation, but something is always gained. <br /><br />Which brings me back to the particularity and universality of trees. In a forest ecosystem, the roots of trees will often graft together, or will at least be connected as fungi share nutrients from root to root. Maybe this is a way religious traditions and worldviewing are connected: root grafting, not twig grafting. The multiplicity of human cultures grows from natural biodiversity, which is vital for the health of the world. Similarities and differences revel together in the mutuality of cooperation and competition. Maintaining such a dynamic equilibrium will only happen if human societies and cultures learn from the structures and functions of their local ecosystems that exhibit self-renewal and resilience, stability and mutability, rootedness and longevity.<br /><br />The superficial tolerance of interfaith dialogue is exposed by this perspective. Prothero is right to critique an insipid uniformity that declares all religions as the same, for good or ill. Both sides fear difference because in their minds difference must entail violence. But conflict is necessary: we learn from challenging stimulation, and ecosystems require disturbance to thrive. An associated, and deeper, problem is that interfaith dialogues, or bashing the faithful, often have no shared place. They have no context and therefore vaporize in abstraction without life lived together. Conversation needs some<em>place</em> to give it context, some embodied reality that can grow and breathe. Uniformity ironically subsidizes hyper-individualism even amidst talk of community: we are all connected, just so long as connectedness doesn’t require anything. Maybe community can be understood as the interdependent relationship and mutual belonging between a place, its inhabitants, and their stories. Relatedness to our neighbor, both human and nonhuman creatures, determines how we act in the world. We won’t save places we don’t love, and we can’t love places we don’t know, and we can’t know places with which we aren’t intimately familiar. The same goes for people. Perhaps some exceptions are conceivable, but proximity matters: where I live, who I live there with, and how I live define my relationship to the world.<br /> <br />Maybe these are the roots of religious nature and practice. Or at least, a way to reinterpret them. <br /><br /><br /><strong>Footnote</strong>: In fact, I think Prothero excluded the three greatest religions of the modern world: capitalism, nationalism, and technological progress. Many people, no matter what their traditional religious heritage, adhere to some permutation of these modern myths. Belief is ultimately not what you say, but what you do.<br /><br />References<br /><br />Berry, W. (1993). <em>Sex, economy, freedom, and community: Eight essays</em>. New York City: Pantheon Books.<br /><br />Caputo, J. D. (2001). <em>On religion</em>. New York: Routledge. <br /><br />Kupperman, J.J. (2010). <em>Theories of human nature</em>. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company.<br /><br />Prothero, S. (2010). <em>God is not one: The eight rival religions that run the world—and why their differences matter</em>. New York: HarperOne.<strong></strong>Jonathan McRayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11320785725421810116noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2118802837677828648.post-6715240380818680032012-02-16T07:48:00.004-06:002012-02-16T07:58:11.184-06:00Religion and Roots: The Danger of a Monolithic Story Part II stumbled across a problem as I read through Stephen Prothero’s <em>God is Not One</em>. My worldview chart in front of me, I read chapters on Christianity, Confucianism, and atheism (as well as Kupperman’s excellent chapter on Marx), skimming Buddhism, Daoism, Judaism, and Yoruba. And my pen, prepared to document three diverging worldviews, rarely scratched the surface because I knew that worldviewing differences do not simply occur between worldviews but within worldviews. Certainly, generalities can be made, which is why a book like Prothero’s is possible, but it is nearly impossible to determine what religious adherents think in the abstract. In fact, too much generalizing can be dangerous: we construct monolithic designations that are then forced down on people we have not even met, instead of letting definitions rise up out of the singularity of an encounter with the other. <br /><br />Prothero does do an extraordinary job of allowing the good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly, the joyous and the tragic to sit in tension with one another. Because, in the end, that is life, and religion is after all a response to life, observation and participation. “By their fruit you will know them,” and religious fruit has been some of the most sweet and the most bitter. Put another way, the church is a whore, but she has also given birth to some of the world’s most devoted servants. And yet, my concerns about monolithic generalizations still stand. A good friend, after reading Prothero’s chapter on Islam, admitted to an extreme prejudice toward that religion because of its views on women. This is certainly something that concerns me, but this concern is not relegated only to Islam. And to say that <em>Islam </em>has <em>a </em>view of women makes no sense in light of hermeneutics, the varied sects and traditions within Islam, and the fact that not all devout Muslims suppress women. The danger for my friend is that this chapter could blind her to actual Muslims who do not share those views, to other Koranic passages, and to alternative interpretations (<strong>Footnote</strong>: I should add here that this friend has since visited with a Muslim classmate who began to dispel preconceived generalizations, an encounter which only supports my claims). It would be irresponsible to gloss over texts of terror, but it would also be irresponsible to assume that our superficial readings are automatically accurate. One New Atheist-sounding friend decries the absolute evil of religion while claiming Gandhi and Martin Luther King as heroes; he explains that they were men ahead of their time who tapped in to universal scientific values by inadvertently eschewing their confining religious trappings. My only response to such violent reductionism was laughter. <br /> <br />So let us imagine that a conflict erupts, or festers. And let’s assume it’s in the Middle East. And a Christian, a Confucian, and an atheist rush to the scene in order to diagnose the cause of the Israel/Palestine struggle. A Christian might say that human sin is the underlying problem and salvation will, as the word implies, save; a Confucian could confess that order is called for, because this conflict smacks of the human dilemma of chaos; and an atheist might laugh at both and say reason will wash away the blood flowing because of religion itself. At this point, I can’t help but ask which Christian walked up: a Southern Baptist fundamentalist or a Latin American liberation theologian, or a more moderate third option? And what exactly is meant by <em>sin </em>and <em>salvation</em>, because such narrative concepts have meant extremely different things? Did the Confucian come from Beijing or from Boston, and from what time period in Chinese history? And was this a friendly or angry atheist: Terry Eagleton or Christopher Hitchens? I could probably relate what some friends might think who fall along these spectrums, but even they are so diverse, constituted by constellations of byzantine intricacy. <br /><br />Religion does not have a pure Platonic essence separate from history and culture, time and place. Come to think of it, nothing does. There is no universal image of a tree: people tend to imagine leaves and bark familiar to where they grew up. In this way, universality is only achieved through particularity. Furthermore, religion is a Western term and it is not until the modern European Enlightenment that everything gets unthreaded and relegated to their own little islands. As I read Prothero, I could not keep things so unthreaded, and I certainly could not locate my “worldview” in one single chapter. I couldn’t help transgressing those boundaries. My heritage is Christian, but there was much in the chapter with which I no longer resonate (including classical theism; even though it’s overly simplistic, for the sake of shaking things up I like to joke with Christian and atheist friends that I’m religious, not spiritual). As I read about Confucianism, I nodded in full agreement concerning virtue ethics and community, but scribbled question marks in the margins next to defenses of patriarchy and rigidly hierarchical government. While I might pass for an atheist in some circles, the grating one-note diatribes of the New Atheists and other fundamentalists remind me of Jim Carrey in Dumb and Dumber: “Hey, wanna hear the most annoying sound in the world?!” <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cVlTeIATBs">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cVlTeIATBs</a> <br /><br />Perhaps my past reading in these areas, not to mention my relationships with flesh and blood, has ruined me to short distillations that sum up an entire historical tradition in a simple problem/solution equation. As good as Prothero’s book is (specifically his nuanced introduction and conclusion), the fact that a Western academic is briefly distilling ancient evolving traditions is important to keep in mind. Of all the religions discussed, I am the least unfamiliar with Christianity and I know it to be profoundly complex and interpretable, though I certainly think there are worse interpretations and better interpretations (usually ones aware of sociopolitical and literary context). Considering Prothero’s description of atonement and Christian history, his Episcopalian upbringing seemed to be an inevitably important player: streams within religions do not simply differ on externals, but also on the internal meaning as well. Having said that, I wonder what Hindus, Buddhists, and Yorubans would say to their respective treatments. Maintaining a conjoined sense of particularity and generality may be difficult, but it is necessary. As such, I don’t think the problem is inherently ignorance about other religions; it is the arrogance that assumes that even in our ignorance we know everything there is to know about the religious other. Humility and hospitality offered generously toward the unknown, toward the stranger and alien in the land, makes the most sense, because we would certainly not want someone to define our identity before having met us. “Do unto others . . .”<br /><br />Our identities are shaped by streaming tributaries that converge in our lives, sometimes gently and sometimes turbulently. I have a mosaic of influences that continues to deconstruct and reconstruct me: literature and literary theory, communitarianism, Continental philosophy, bioregionalism and permaculture, natural and social sciences, Critical Theory, philosophy of religion, postcolonial histories, socioliterary and historical-contextual biblical interpretation, not to mention experiences, conversations, and all the things of which I’m not even aware. If there is predestination then it must be how we are somewhat determined by our own stories, our own historical, cultural, geographic, genetic contexts. We are only free in that determination. <br /><br />My father is a family doctor who dedicated twenty years of his life to serving the uninsured in the impoverished Appalachian Mountains of East Tennessee. We moved to rural Jellico when I was two years old in order to pay off medical school debt before relocating to Honduras. However, my parents’ roots supplanted their plans and they devoted themselves to revitalizing the struggling non-profit healthcare center, community hospital, and country clinics. Those hills and its people and their stories spoke too deeply to leave. <br /><br />They spoke deeply, nourishing like Southern hospitality, porch conversations and folk music, four-part harmonies and leaves turned into chimes by the wind, dogwood flowers and honeysuckle in the spring and fiery colors in the Autumnal hills. They spoke deeply, haunting like twelve-year olds getting pregnant, a Xanax-addicted girl whose landlord collected the monthly rent from her bed, drug rates and chronic unemployment proportional to major urban centers, a woman with a labyrinth of scars across her stomach from when her mother doused her in gasoline and drew the scars with cigarette fire, a dying town and raped mountains sucked dry by coal mining. My dad often told me that any understanding of the world or of God, whatever that means, must first make sense in the generational poverty and strip-mined mountains in Appalachia, at the gates of Auschwitz, or the walled ghettos of the West Bank and Gaza. Most do not. Without such understandings, I will smugly declare that my reality is normality while ignoring that it is in many ways a façade constructed from the ruins of other lives and places. I will decide that I have no past and therefore no responsibility to the past, the present, the future, or to place. The stories I was told growing up, and in which I strive to reside, re-imagined religion, fundamentally and etymologically, as what binds us back to the wreckage and gift of the beautiful risk of life. From before I can remember, these stories—of history and literature, of people we knew, and parables and narratives from religious traditions—have informed me and shaped me, renewed me and subverted me.Jonathan McRayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11320785725421810116noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2118802837677828648.post-90032027251712291192012-02-12T09:27:00.002-06:002012-02-12T09:36:45.562-06:00The Nature of Work: Earth, Community, and Healing Alienation Part IIIActivist and theologian Ched Myers asserts that some early monastic communities provide an example of just such a transformation. Certain monastic communities believed that the project of civilization is constructed on the centralization and exploitation of wealth; if that is the case, then communities should become as self-sufficient as possible (Myers, 1994, p. 182). Furthermore, they claimed that exploitation and wealth stratification stem from the alienation of human labor, so in order to restore dignity and respect (as opposed to humiliation and shame), they centered their communal lives around shared manual, and therefore unalienated, work (<em>ibid</em>, p. 182). Contemporary examples include the worker-owned cooperatives of Mondragon (Clark, 2002, pp. 397-399); the agrarian local democracies of Kerala, India (<em>ibid</em>, pp. 399-400); and the grassroots cleanup and urban agriculture of the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative in Boston (<em>ibid</em>, pp. 401-402), to name only a very few.<br /><br />Such examples highlight the need for meaningful engagement with other living things which, as mentioned previously, can help heal trauma (Suzuki, 2007, p. 257). In a statement that supports the notion of a permaculture farm and education center, Suzuki points out that mental health is enriched through horticultural activities: “gardens are becoming an integral part of the healing therapies at schools, nursing homes, hospitals, prisons and more” (<em>ibid</em>, p. 257). Not only is this due to humanity’s need for intimacy with the natural world, but due also to the connection between the mind and body, both of which are engaged by good work just as they are engaged by art, music, dancing, and repetitive rhythms, all of which excite the hypothalamus while simultaneously suppressing self-conscious orientation (Clark, 2002, p. 228).<br /><br />Recognizing this connection is crucial to this argument because, as Mark Clark states, the human mind is the body “plus all its relationships” (<em>ibid</em>, p. 162). We cannot escape the intricate web of relatedness, even within our own bodies. Our bodies cannot heal alone, as if they existed in isolation (Berry, 2002, p. 99), because healing is conviviality (<em>ibid</em>, p. 99), which includes the deep felt needs of belonging and purposeful meaning. The process of healing restores the connections within our bodies (Clark, 2002, p. 228) and between our bodies and the world. In fact, the word <em>health </em>stems from an Old English word meaning <em>wholeness</em>, and so healing is the renewal of wholeness. <br /><br />Peter Levine emphasizes this wholeness in his research on the physiological effects of trauma. He declares that the “key to healing traumatic symptoms in humans is in our physiology” (Levine, 1997, p. 17). Animal bodies, including humans, have evolved instinctual mechanisms that keep them safe, including the freeze/immobility strategy (ibid, p. 95), which “often leads to human trauma” (<em>ibid</em>, p. 97) because of our learnt inability to discharge extreme trauma energy (<em>ibid</em>, p. 35). However, animals rarely suffer from trauma because, once they determine the threat has passed, “they often begin to vibrate, twitch, and lightly tremble” (<em>ibid</em>, p. 97), which are the “organism’s way of regulating extremely different states of nervous system activation” (<em>ibid</em>, p. 98). Because of this, wild animals should be our teachers in trauma healing because they portray “nature in balance” (<em>ibid</em>, p. 98). If we humans allowed the fluid and adaptive biological response to run its course we could ameliorate the symptoms (<em>ibid</em>, p. 37). Therefore, humans have much to learn by studying and experiencing the natural world because not only are we healed by acknowledging our connection to nature, but we are also healed by imitating nature. This gives further credence to permaculture and bioregionalism (see McGinnis, 1999; Carr, 2004). <br /><br />Much more elaborative and practical work must be done, including detailed accounts of specific case studies, but this sketch provides a developing basis for future praxis. Even so, I am committed to participating in the cultural renewal of communities that foster an “ethic of <em>interdependence</em>, <em>partnership</em>, and <em>limiting violence</em> (Schirch, 2004, p. 15) and that also recognize their place within natural ecosystems. Furthermore, recognition of connection to nature and to one another through imagination and the creativity of shared work manifest restorative justice and trauma healing. <br /><br />A permaculture farm and education center can take seriously the nature and practice of community articulated here, and restorative justice could benefit from this definition that potentially addresses social harms as well as ecological devastation, in which humans are also offenders. Sustainability, maintaining a dynamic equilibrium, can only make sense if human societies and cultures learn from the structures and functions of their local ecosystems that exhibit self-renewal and resilience, stability and mutability, rootedness and longevity. Meaningful work and actual craft can also be provided for people, especially as urban agriculture and eco-building spread more and more widely. And in this case, viable jobs and skills transform alienation by fusing with the therapy of the natural world and the therapy of engaging both the mind and the body in creative acts. The traumatic effects on offenders of harming others can be just as crippling as the victims’ experience (Yoder, 2005, p. 14), which only strengthens the argument made here. These diversified places of play, education, and work “create safe spaces in which to heal” (Schirch, 2004, pp. 46-48) for both victims and offenders, separately and possibly together through forms of Victim Offender Conferencing. <br /><br />Lorraine Stuzman Amstutz laments that a critical issue in VOC and other restorative justice approaches is its currently individualistic nature (Stuzman Amstutz, 2009, p. 80) even though community is central to restorative justice processes. This is understandable to a certain extent, because VOC is usually seen as a curative rather than a preventative. However, locating this process in an agroecosystem begins to erode the dichotomy between preventing and healing and gives the communal aspect of restorative justice some livability, without which it vaporizes in abstraction and the status quo persists. The name Victim Offender Conferencing almost begs for this to occur: in Latin, <em>to confer</em> simply means “to bring together.” An integrative vision weaving together nature, community, healing, and work is worthy of a restorative name. <br /><br /><br />References<br /><br />Berry, W. (1993). <em>Sex, economy, freedom, and community: Eight essays</em>. New York City: Pantheon Books.<br /><br />Berry, W. and Wirzba, N. (Ed.). (2002). <em>The art of the commonplace: The agrarian essays of Wendell Berry</em>. Berkeley: Counterpoint.<br /><br />Block, P. (2009). <em>Community: The structure of belonging</em>. San Francisco: Berret-Koehler Publishers, Inc.<br /><br />Carr, M. (2004). <em>Bioregionalism and civil society: Democratic challenges to corporate globalism</em>. Vancouver: UBC Press.<br /><br />Clark, M. E. (2002). <em>In search of human nature</em>. New York: Routledge. <br /><br />Davis, E. F. (2009). <em>Scripture, culture, and agriculture: An agrarian reading of the bible</em>. New York: Cambridge University Press.<br /><br />Gilligan, J. (2001). <em>Preventing violence</em>. New York: Thames & Hudson. <br /><br />Holmgren, D. (2004). <em>Essence of permaculture</em>. Retrieved June 30, 2011, from Holmgren Design Services Website: <a href="http://www.holmgren.com.au/">http://www.holmgren.com.au/</a> <br /><br />Kupperman, J.J. (2010). <em>Theories of human nature</em>. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company.<br /><br />Levine, P. A. (1997). <em>Waking the tiger: Healing trauma</em>. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books. <br /><br />McGinnis, M. V. (1999). <em>Bioregionalism</em>. New York: Routledge. <br /><br />Myers, C. (1994). <em>Who will roll away the stone?: Discipleship queries for first world Christians</em>. Maryknoll: Orbis Books.<br /><br />Schirch, L. (2004). <em>The little book of strategic peacebuilding</em>. Intercourse: Good Books.<br /><br />Stuzman Amstutz, Lorraine. (2009). <em>The little book of victim offender conferencing: Bringing victims and offenders together in dialogue</em>. Intercourse: Good Books.<br /><br />Suzuki, D. with McConnell, A. & Mason, A. (2007). <em>The sacred balance: Rediscovering our place in nature</em>. (3rd ed.). Berkeley: GreyStone Books. <br /><br />Yoder, C. (2005). <em>The little book of trauma healing: When violence strikes and community security is threatened</em>. Intercourse: Good Books.<br /><br />Zehr, H. (2002). <em>The little book of restorative justice</em>. Intercourse: Good Books.Jonathan McRayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11320785725421810116noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2118802837677828648.post-29627723893292980932012-02-11T13:36:00.003-06:002012-02-11T13:43:43.677-06:00The Nature of Work: Earth, Community, and Healing Alienation Part IIRooted in “ecological science and systems theory” (Holmgren, 2004, p. 4) as well as community research, religious traditions, and native cultures of place (<em>ibid</em>, p. 6), permaculture stems from three interrelated ethical maxims: “Care for the earth (husband soil, forests and water)”; “Care for people (look after self, kin and community)” ; and “Fair share (set limits to consumption and reproduction, and redistribute surplus)” (<em>ibid</em>, p. 6). Furthermore, the word permaculture not only means permanent and sustainable agriculture but also permanent and sustainable culture (<em>ibid</em>, p. 1). Bill Mollison, one of the co-originators of the concept, maintains that a stable social order is not possible without some form of permanent agroecology (Carr, 2004, p. 150) and method of human habitat design, which has too often reinforced our schism with nature (Suzuki, 2007, p. 261). Permaculture’s design principles are applicable from the home garden scale to entire cities (Carr, 2004, p. 152) as well as to politics and economics. In permaculture’s view, caring for people and caring for the earth cannot be divorced from one another, and caring for the former cannot happen without caring for the latter. Human societies can and should be based on mutualisms in natural ecosystems, such as mycorrhizal fungi on tree roots, in order to foster a “fundamental ethic of interdependence and kinship” (<em>ibid</em>, p. 150).<br /><br />This suggestion is not an impossible pipedream. David Suzuki reminds us that for nearly all of human existence we lived wholly immersed in nature and are still utterly dependent on it (Suzuki, 2007, p. 255). Ninety-nine percent of human existence has been lived in small egalitarian hunter-gatherer/horticultural band societies that imitated their bioregional habitats (<em>ibid</em>, p. 248), which was and is the norm for many indigenous cultures. Because of this ecological context of human evolution, Suzuki argues, it is extremely probable that the human genome has “a genetically programmed need to be in the company of other species” (<em>ibid</em>, p. 256). The biologist and myrmecologist E. O. Wilson coined the term <em>biophilia </em>to describe this engrained need, defined as “‘the innate tendency to focus on life and life-like processes,’” thus producing an emotional connection between humans and other forms of life (<em>ibid</em>, p. 256) that will certainly be culturally shaped and embodied. Because of this, Suzuki asserts that it is scientifically verifiable that human creatures have an evolved need for intimacy with nature and, citing Roger S. Ulrich, purports that much of humanity’s search for meaning and fulfillment depends on our relationship to the earth (<em>ibid</em>, p. 259). <br /><br />Mary Clark agrees by claiming that purposeful meaning and a sense of belonging comprise two of humanity’s most basic needs (Clark, 2002, p. 364). These two central needs, along with the need for nature, have enormous power to heal trauma, and Clark also references research by Ulrich which suggests that views of nature substantially reduce time needed to recover from surgery (<em>ibid</em>, pp. 226-227). On a similar note, inmates in a Michigan state prison with cell windows viewing farms and forest required twenty-four percent fewer medical visits than inmates with windows facing the interior courtyard (Suzuki, 2007, p. 257). <br /><br />Moreover, Clark stresses that humans need interactive communities, which means “belonging in a physical place, shared by known others,” because without “this grounding in [our] physical surroundings,” community disintegrates into apathetic societies (<em>ibid</em>, p. 395). As perceptual psychologist James J. Gibson notes, sentient beings can only survive if they actively explore their surroundings, which requires that they actually physically move through them (<em>ibid</em>, p. 164). This physical movement concretizes and contextualizes recognition of place and begins to uncover both preventative and curative approaches to trauma and violence. Indeed, Clark suggests that the nature and practice of community presented here, which reflectively roots humanity within the earth’s ecosystems, can begin to address both our human and environmental problems (<em>ibid</em>, p. 306). We won’t save places we don’t love, and we can’t love places we don’t know, and we can’t know places with which we aren’t intimately familiar. Perhaps some exceptions are conceivable, but proximity matters: where I live, who I live there with, and how I live define my relationship to the world. <br /><br />From his Kentucky farm, Wendell Berry submits that the name of this relationship to the world is work, and the name of an appropriate relationship to the earth is good work (Berry, 1993, p. 35). For Berry, good work is given shape in particularity, because the diversity of the world and of those who work is contextually shaped and named (<em>ibid</em>, p. 36). But this particularity is informed by the common need to consciously and carefully decide “[h]ow we take our lives from this world, how we work, what work we do, how well we use the materials we use, and what we do with them after we have used them” (<em>ibid</em>, p. 109) because caring for the earth is an ancient responsibility, and one that must be done well if humanity is to survive (Berry, 2002, p. 46).<br /><br />Clearly, by <em>work </em>I do not mean any task done in exchange for payment or something grueling which distracts us from more productive pursuits. I mean work, at least good work, as the union of the body and mind in creative and responsible engagement with the world. In this case, work and play are not antithetical. Permaculture’s rigorous design principles and cooperatively-managed agroecosystems reduce the amount of labor hours because they let ecological succession to take its course, thus allowing far more leisure time. This is important because, as psychiatrist James Gilligan notes, unalienated labor is only possible if it expresses “spontaneous and voluntary creativity, curiosity, playfulness, initiative, and sociability—that is, the sense of solidarity with the community, the fulfillment of one’s true and ‘essential’ human nature as ‘social’ and ‘political’ animals, to be fulfilled and made human by their full participation in a culture” (Gilligan, 2001, p. 103). <br /><br />This articulation resonates with traditional societies that believed good work is the en-fleshing of wisdom, which is not only intellectual but is “any activity that stands in a consistently productive relationship to the material world and nurtures the creative imagination” (Davis, 2009, p. 144). Imagination must include the ability to conceive of others not ourselves, including humans, nonhumans, and places, and so work, if it is to be good work, in one place cannot deal destructively with other places. If society is interconnected, then this imagination must be focused on victims and offenders as well. <br /><br />Unfortunately, modern Western societies have unimaginatively prized the intellectual at the expense of the physical and the ordinary, even if such work is skilled, to the extent that such work is shamed (<em>ibid</em>, p. 144). While Karl Marx never questioned capitalism’s foundation on progressive industrialism, and so did not make the distinction made here between work and good work, he nevertheless attacked this alienation of labor. According to Marx, modern life is tainted by alienation, which can only be remedied by the fair opportunity to pursue a desirable life (Kupperman, 2010, p. 145), understood as “a balanced work life and also satisfactory connections with other human beings in general” (<em>ibid</em>, p. 143), which should sound familiar by now. The present division of labor, however, prevents this balance because workers are alienated from work: they have no ownership or input into the kind of work being done (<em>ibid</em>, p. 148) because they are mechanistically relegated to one simplified task in an operation system (<em>ibid</em>, p. 149). As such, alienation chips away at any possible participation in meaningful community (Clark, 2002, p. 25). Economic and social arrangements must be transformed in order for diversified modes of fulfilling work to take place. Such could be the case in networked and diversified urban or rural permaculture systems that viewed work like Berry and Gilligan, a movement already happening. Jonathan McRayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11320785725421810116noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2118802837677828648.post-66350545106211696632012-02-10T21:19:00.002-06:002012-02-10T21:22:58.942-06:00The Nature of Work: Earth, Community, and Healing Alienation Part IHumans are inextricably connected to the earth. We inhabit, breathe, drink, and eat this strange blue globe that is our only home. The oldest religious traditions recognized this scientific fact by weaving stories, almost myths-as-memory, which describe humans as creatures crafted from the dirt: <em>adam </em>and <em>adama</em>, <em>human </em>and <em>humus</em>, <em>culture </em>and <em>cultivate</em>. Indeed, the plurality of human cultures grows from natural biodiversity. And we are social animals, dependent for better or worse on other lives beyond ourselves. The peacebuilding practice of restorative justice recognizes this by believing that society is interconnected (Zehr, 2002, p. 19), a belief that reframes crime as the cause and effect of damaged relationships (ibid, p. 20). According to medical biologist and physicist Peter Levine, damaged relationships and disconnection from a sense of belonging lie at the root of violence and trauma (Levine, 1997, p. 266). If this is true, then the proper response to crime, to the “violation of people and interpersonal relationships,” is the obligation to make things as right as possible (Zehr, 2002, p. 19), which includes the rehabilitation of the offender.<br /><br />But rehabilitation to what? If crime is both personal and societal (ibid, p. 12), and these two are interconnected, then simply rehabilitating offenders to this broken locus, especially after the alienating and shaming force of prison, can perpetuate the cycle of violence, certainly evident in recidivism and incarceration rates (see Gilligan, 2001). The current legal system also alienates victims in the emphasis on crime as an offense to the state. Biologist Mary E. Clark points out that excessive physical or psychological trauma, such as that experienced in crime, alters the very structure of the brain, and if healing does not occur after the initial stress, then victims may not be able to integrate into healthy and comfortable social settings (Clark, 2002, p. 63). If restorative justice is right, however, then situating crime in the nexus of social relatedness demands the restoration of society itself, which should include the realization that we are also embedded in nonhuman life. <br /><br />Which brings me once again to the intimate human connection with the natural world. This realization is necessary for right relationships and a healthy culture. And so is the need for belonging and for participation in meaningful and creative work. I am therefore arguing for the union of unalienated work, nature, community, healing, and place. This union can deeply inform preventative and responsive approaches of restorative justice and trauma healing. The topic is personal because it foresees work I hope to do in the future with a close group of friends. In order to embody the proposed argument and vision of this paper, we have discussed the potential of a permaculture farm and education center as a site for restorative justice and trauma healing. A permaculture-based agroecosystem could serve as an ideal place for the emotionally and physically draining meetings of Victim Offender Conferencing. Furthermore, the farm could be a transitional home for people recently released from prison and who have struggled with addictions and homelessness where viable skills and crafts are learned and a sense of belonging is cultivated. <br /><br />In a way, such a farm and community would microcosmically incarnate an alternative configuration of society envisioned by restorative justice. Meaningful work and practical skills are important and cannot be undervalued, and neither can the sense of belonging found in authentic community. The nature and practice of community is vital to the vision presented here. A working definition of this elusive term must be offered in order to ground the following conversation. The term has been stretched like a balloon in contemporary parlance, evidenced in expansive expressions such as the “academic community,” the “online community,” the “global community,” etc. Such combinations might realize our interconnectedness, but they also dilute “community” of any bioregional emphasis, local mutuality, and ultimately <em>interdependence</em>. This modern dilution, or delusion, depends on what Mary Clark labels the Billiard Ball Gestalt, which sees everything as “isolated, discrete objects that have distinct boundaries” (Clark, 2002, p. 6), a worldview which geneticist and environmentalist David Suzuki contends ultimately confines humans to their own minds as “separate individuals acting on and relating to other separate individuals and on a lifeless, dumb world beyond the body” (Suzuki, 2007, p. 275). And so community ironically retains a pathological individualism (ibid, p. 263): we may be connected, but only as long as nothing is required of us. <br /><br />This worldview results in fragmentation, loneliness, separation, and the fear of death, summed up in the word <em>alienation</em>: “[w]e are strangers in the world, we no longer belong (ibid, p. 275). Systems based on extreme individualism, like the legal/judicial structure, result in overcrowded prisons (Clark, 2002, p. 331) and heighten an offender’s experience of alienation (Zehr, 2002, p. 16). Clark offers the Indra’s Net Gestalt as an alternative hermeneutic, in which we interpret the world as connected, interdependent, and interacting in bodies, economies, social arrangements, and ecosystems (Clark, 2002, p. 9). While not an absolutist picture of reality (ibid, p. 12), Indra’s Net has the potential to counter alienation by cultivating a sense of belonging. Societal beliefs have a habit of constructing the behaviors they articulate, and so the question becomes which reality we wish to inhabit. <br /><br />Design consultant and writer Peter Block contends that “[c]ommunity is fundamentally an interdependent human system given form by the conversation it holds with itself” (2009, p. 30), stressing context as belief systems and ways of speaking (ibid, p. 15). This is surely true, so at times we must shift our context, or perhaps reinterpret and re-imagine it. But, like a community, a conversation itself is also given form, and therefore must take place in and with someplace. Context is certainly linguistic, but it is also economic, sociopolitical, religious, biological, ecological, and geographical. For a conversation to have any function, let alone meaning, it must have a context that shapes the conversation’s incarnation and is in turn shaped by it. <br /><br />Block’s definition, though very useful, must paradoxically be narrowed and expanded. Activist, writer, and farmer Wendell Berry defends just such a paradox. “By community,” he writes, “I mean the commonwealth and common interests, commonly understood, of people living together in a place and wishing to continue to do so. To put it another way, community is a locally understood interdependence of local people, local culture, local economy, and local nature” (1993, p. 119). With this definition he narrows Block’s designation by repeating the word local, claiming that community must be rooted, and expands it by introducing nature, recognizing that community is not restricted to human structures but incorporates the nonhuman as well: a community “is like an ecosystem, and it includes—or it makes itself harmoniously a part of—its local ecosystem” (ibid, p.155). In fact, Berry claims that if we are speaking of a healthy community then we must speak of more than humans, because we will be talking about a place and all its inhabitants: the neighborhood of humans and “its soil, its water, its air, and all the families and tribes of the nonhuman creatures that belong to it . . . All neighbors are included” (ibid, pp. 14, 15). <br /><br />Block concurs, and beautifully articulates, that community is centrally about belonging (2009, p. xii), thus clarifying that it is relatedness to our neighbor, both human and nonhuman creatures, that determines how we act in the world. Community can then be understood as the interdependent relationship and mutual belonging between place, its inhabitants, and their stories. Clark believes that understanding and practicing this can help to restore the balance of traumatized brains, in which “the normal integration between motivational and cognitive regions of the brain” has been severely disrupted (Clark, 2002, p. 225). She argues that humans experience an overwhelming need to belong to some form of caring community (ibid, p. 228), which aids in restructuring the traumatized brain by “building an emotional bonding of trust” that is crucial for the body to heal itself (ibid, p. 225). Permaculture constructively envisions the practicality of this definition and how it correlates with nature, work, and healing.Jonathan McRayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11320785725421810116noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2118802837677828648.post-54600436927268350922012-02-08T16:49:00.001-06:002012-02-08T16:50:41.345-06:00Forgiveness and Life TogetherForgiveness, like most concepts of any worth, is notoriously difficult to define. This is unavoidable, because such definitions must inevitably emerge from the ethos of specific times and locations in which that particular definition holds meaning. After all, the word ethos stems from the same root as ethic, both referring to character, custom, spirit, and habit. While I agree with Gayle Lenore Macnab’s statement that forgiveness is not easy or simple (53), it can at least suggest a certain rhythm because of cultivation within a community. Indeed, communities cannot survive without something like forgiveness, which is both biologically evolved and culturally refined. Perhaps forgiveness is necessary at times because some acts are so unspeakable, so unforgivable, that reparation for and sense of them can never be made. French philosopher Jacques Derrida suggested that maybe forgiveness, if it exists at all, exists only where there is the unforgivable; its possibility happens only in its impossibility. Certainly, people cannot and should not be demanded to forgive, but can we confess that the refusal to do so could produce slavery to the past that will project that fracture into the future? Forgiveness, as Macnab points out, reclaims life for the victim by leading to a path of “health and growth” (57).<br /><br />Forgiveness, as Macnab rightly acknowledges, is not the longing for a different past, because “the past cannot be changed” (56). If the past could be changed, then there would be nothing to forgive, and if it could be forgotten than forgiveness would cease to exist (54). Forgiveness necessitates remembering. Like the cycle of seasons, forgiveness opens up a radical transformation of the past and a reinterpretation of time. Forgiveness is like a palimpsest: parchment on which ink has been erased to make room for something new even as the previous indentation remains. The past is not changed but re-formed, because forgiveness is going back to the future.<br /> <br />Macnab makes the important observation that forgiveness is not “[d]ependent on the offender’s request for forgiveness” (54), an observation which effectively reverses dominant societal logic. For many, forgiveness cannot happen unless the offender is repentant. Macnab challenges this logic, and in doing so allies herself with ancient wisdom such as the parable of the prodigal son. In that story, there is no reason to assume that the son is repentant when he decides to return home; his decision is due more to the fact that he is wallowing with the pigs. But his father, watching his son come down the road, does not know why he returns, only that he does return. The father runs out on the road and embraces his child, who now cries out that he is not worthy and should work in the fields to repay his debt. In this story, forgiveness creates repentance and the past can be transformed. <br /><br /><br />The Steps Toward Conflict Prevention Project (STEPS) is a remarkable program and an crucial conversation partner around justice and peacemaking. Marshall Wallace and his partners have recognized that communities have the unmatched potential to offer subversive alternatives to violence. Such examples are vital, life-giving, because they provide current manifestations of what resistance to violence and restoration of wholeness can look like. <br /><br />Wallace notes the centrality of identity in the formation of such resistant and restorative communities (70). But identity is given an interesting and important twist: identity is often tied to ethnicity, but in STEPS cases identity is rooted in ethics (71). As mentioned in the previous reading response, ethics are closely related to ethos, which is the customs and habits and spirit of the community. In the STEPS cases, these ethics, or the ethos of the community, appear to be intentionally cultivated, which means to refine, inhabit, or till, like fertile topsoil which invites, indeed requires, future inputs and improvements. This intentionality consciously and critically joins the wisdom of the past with concrete practices in the present to address the potential of the future. The art of living together is required because radical acts such as compassion, forgiveness, hospitality, and love must be practiced with neighbors if they are ever to be offered to enemies. The alternative community from the Ghazni province in Afghanistan preserves and reinterprets local culture and tradition through music, education, and consensus-based decision-making (72) and inevitably poses a haunting question to current societies all over the world. <br /><br />This question is also strikingly posed to peacebuilding practitioners. Often, it seems, peacebuilders want to address root causes but don’t want to put down roots. In my experience, peacebuilding activists frequently lack community like the ones mentioned by Wallace. A group of individuals committed to the same goal or having the same conversation does not constitute community: they share nothing but ideas, which can be fleeting. Healthy activists and movements seem to be grounded in a sustaining community with shared space, time, resources, memories, values, and practices. Jean Vanier, the founder of the L’Arche communities, suggests that “To struggle for a cause it is best for people to be rooted in a community where they are learning reconciliation, acceptance of difference and of their own darkness, and how to celebrate . . . A community that does not celebrate is in danger of becoming just a group of people that get things done.” Activists can be so preoccupied with the future that they forget response-ability to the present moment. We need prophetic communities that microcosmically cultivate a restorative culture and imagine what the alternative future looks like right now. With models like the Ghazni province, the Muslim community in Rwanda, and the Colombian peace villages, that alternative future appears more tangible and more livable. Jonathan McRayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11320785725421810116noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2118802837677828648.post-44102027120942055852011-12-09T08:11:00.002-06:002011-12-09T08:14:12.379-06:00Agricultural Development: Bustan QaraaqaBustan Qaraaqa (Arabic for the Tortoise Garden; <a href="www.bustanqaraaqa.org">www.bustanqaraaqa.org</a>) is a community permaculture farm located in the village of Beit Sahour, on the eastern edge of Bethlehem, Palestine. Established in 2008 by British ecologists and activists and local Palestinian partners, Bustan Qaraaqa is based in a one-hundred-year old stone house on fourteen dunums of land situated in Wadi Hanna Saad. The purpose of the farm is to catalyze a grassroots agroecological movement in the occupied Palestinian territories that responds to severe problems of food insecurity and ecosystem degradation. Such problems stem from humanitarian and environmental crises that are often instigated and exacerbated by the ongoing Israeli military occupation. Palestinians have endured extreme loss of land and lack of water access because of settlement construction and the establishment of the separation wall, which strengthens Israel’s monopolization of natural resources. Furthermore, the occupation has intensified soil and water pollution, habitat destruction, territorial fragmentation, movement restriction, and economic isolation. These effects aggravate population growth, species decline, desertification, and climate change.<br /><br />In close collaboration with local neighbors, Bustan Qaraaqa serves as a model farm for experimentation and demonstration of permaculture designs and techniques for communal living through simple and inexpensive projects. The farm is also an education center that trains and assists local farmers throughout the region, as well as facilitating ecosystem restoration, species rehabilitation and conservation, food production for people in the midst of economic crises, and cultivating communal interdependence and pride as a form of resistance to military occupation. Ecological, economic, and social aspects are clearly embodied. <br /><br />Permaculture is an important asset-based community and agricultural development strategy, because its methods “focus on the opportunities rather than the obstacles” (Holmgren, 2004, p. 4). Rooted in “ecological science and systems theory” (ibid, p. 4) as well as community research, religious traditions, and native cultures of place (ibid, p. 6), permaculture stems from three interrelated ethical maxims: “Care for the earth (husband soil, forests and water)”; “Care for people (look after self, kin and community)”; and “Fair share (set limits to consumption and reproduction, and redistribute surplus)” (ibid, p. 6). Furthermore, the word permaculture not only means permanent and sustainable agriculture but also permanent and sustainable culture (ibid, p. 1).<br /><br />Bustan Qaraaqa’s permaculture projects reverse deforestation, enliven degraded soils, nurture biodiversity, collect and reuse water, and minimize negative consequences of human footprints on the earth by composting waste, recycling old material, and efficient design. The farm’s current projects include a tree nursery, water conservation and reuse, green building, and fish farming. <br /><br />The free tree nursery harbors native and adapted plants in order to ameliorate environmental degradation through re-habitation and reforestation. Making adapted and native trees, some of which had gone extinct in the region, available to local communities is a vital step to reforesting the region into an edible landscape. The nursery contains over fifty species that provide food, fuel, building materials, soil restoration and remediation, landscaping, ecosystems restoration, and resistance to land confiscation. Bustan Qaraaqa’s workers have widespread experience in agroforestry projects. <br /><br />Water conservation and reuse is another major project. Water shortage and lack of access is a rampant problem in the Palestinian territories. Israeli settlements consume twice the amount of water that Palestinian communities consume (Palestine monitor, 2009, p. 46); the World Health Organization states that a decent standard of living implies 100 liters per person each day, while the average West Bank Palestinian barely drinks 70. Israel also controls 80% of the West Bank’s depleting groundwater sources and the Jordan River, which is channeled to taps in Tel Aviv and farms in the Negev; such diversion has severely diminished the ancient waterway and has made essential aquifers extremely vulnerable to salinization and raw sewage (Faris, 2011). Over 200,000 people in rural villages are disconnected from the water network, and those who are connected rarely receive an uninterrupted supply due to military stoppages and rerouted pipes. The situation may worsen in light of climate change and population growth. Bustan Qaraaqa develops rainwater harvesting systems for rooftop and road runoff, which is stored in cisterns and tanks for household and irrigation use. Additionally, the farm utilizes swales (ditches dug along the contour of a slope) to retain water, build up soil, and prevent erosion. Bustan Qaraaqa also practices and demonstrates water conservation and recycling with a humanure toilet (which is also a form of waste management) and an elaborate graywater reuse system. <br /><br />The farm’s green building program includes rainwater catchment, humanure toilet, showers, kitchen, and a greenhouse. The greenhouse embodies four design principles, each achieved through a variety of methods: reduced material consumption (multifunctional architecture, using salvaged materials, and using local materials for eco-construction); water conservation (rainwater harvesting and storage, water recycling, and graywater biofiltration); climate improvement (carbon-neutral winter heating, solar passive winter warming, and efficient design for summer cooling); and food production (winter fruits and vegetables, summer fruits and vegetables such as tropical crops, and an aquaponics system). <br /><br />The aquaponics system, which is the first one in the West Bank, is also part of Bustan Qaraaqa’s fish farming project. The project was pioneered by the BySpokes crew (www.byspokes.org) and has been replicated in numerous urban and rural sites in Beit Sahour and the Jordan River Valley. The aquaponics system uses cheap and locally-available (mostly reclaimed) material and effectively works with the high alkalinity of the West Bank’s groundwater. This system grows plants that require copious amounts of water even during the long dry season, and is capable of growing locally-adapted and exotic plants.<br /> <br />Permaculture projects like Bustan Qaraaqa are extremely transferable. Even though permaculture, as a form of agroecology, is highly contextual, the principles and design methods are applicable in any setting. Permaculture’s co-originator David Holmgren’s twelve principles testifies are: observe and interact; catch and use energy; self-regulate and accept feedback; use and value renewable resources and services; produce no waste; design from patterns to details; integrate rather than segregate; use small and slow solutions; use and value diversity; use edges and value the marginal; and creatively use and respond to change (2004, p. 7-18). Permaculture started in Australia and has been used in the Middle East, Asia, Europe, and the Americas. With Bustan Qaraaqa as an example, permaculture design and development simultaneously addresses scientific, economic, and social factors. <br /><br /><br /><br />References<br /><br />Faris, S. (2011). Holy water: A precious commodity in a region of conflict. Retrieved October 29, 2011, from Orion Magazine.<br />site: <a href="http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/6473">http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/6473</a> <br /><br />Holmgren, D. (2004). Essence of permaculture. Retrieved June 30, 2011, from Holmgren <br />Design Services Website. <br />site: <a href="http://www.holmgren.com.au/">http://www.holmgren.com.au/</a> <br /><br />Palestine monitor 2009 factbook. (2009). Ramallah: Palestine Monitor & HDIP.Jonathan McRayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11320785725421810116noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2118802837677828648.post-76076766494319522212011-12-06T19:06:00.002-06:002011-12-06T19:09:19.551-06:00Intervention ReflectionInterventions, whether developmental or medical, are often presented in militaristic language, in which a foreign third-party forcefully enters the scene to right a wrong. Even when the intentions are supposedly peaceful, this framework only exacerbates the pre-existing conflict. However, some version of intervention is sometimes necessary, and is much more effective when conducted by those familiar with the context of conflict, which necessitates time and proximity. Professionalizing intervention would seem to foster neither, because it more rigidly establishes the role of the intervener as an outsider, and usually a transient one at that. Certainly outsiders can and do play a vital role, but outsiders must be intimate with a place in order to intervene respectfully and appropriately, and foreign specialization does not often encourage either one. <br /><br />A classmate and I had a fascinating conversation regarding John Paul Lederach’s intervention in the Oka crisis. This case study provided fertile space in which to discuss and wrestle with the ethics of intervention. My friend wondered if Lederach’s decision to refuse participation in strategies of violence was an ethical decision, because he believes Lederach is not a stakeholder in this situation and, as a privileged outsider, should present a diversity of tactics to his clients. My friend is wary of solely ideological assumptions of violence and peace which do not attempt to understand their contextual emergence. I am sympathetic to this suspicion, and I agree that Lederach is definitely not a major stakeholder like the First Nation groups are: Lederach’s life is not woven into the texture of those events and thus has the ability to leave at any moment. However, I also think that once Lederach ruptures the sphere of influence by arriving in that place, he cannot now pretend like he is disinterested. His introduction into the ecosystem of conflict not only changes his organismal interactions within it, but his introduction also transforms the ecosystem itself; in this way, he has a stake simply because he is now present. Once we know and have witnessed we are called by the event to respond, whether in action or feigned ignorance.<br /><br />I understand the point my friend made about presenting a diversity of tactics. However, I think Lederach did allow this to happen in a way. He did not encourage the First Nation groups to give up violent resistance, instead simply opting not to assist in strategizing. This is a valid decision considering his skillset, which does not include strategic planning for violent revolution. Furthermore, polite silence is not the same thing as solidarity; I’m not convinced by imperialistic intervention or by sterile objectivity. Allies should be able to offer insights, advice, and experience, which are all embedded in valuations of the world. Ultimately, the intervener should leave the final decision to the people whose lives are irrevocably intertwined in the context, even if the intervener disagrees with the ultimate decision. But the intervener, as an ally, also has the responsibility to voice concern and to make suggestions. Could Lederach have participated in strategizing for violent resistance by assuming an advocacy role for nonviolent direct action? My friend’s important concern is that renouncing violent revolution often leads to denouncing any form of revolution, effectively shutting the door on both. In the Oka crisis, the First Nation groups’ desire was reclamation of ancestral land, while the government’s only purpose was to dissolve tension. In a way, by not strategizing perhaps Lederach subsidized the government’s aims by ending the confrontation: the government’s goals were met while the First Nation groups were silenced. At this point, he could have played the role of both activist and translator-guide (process design and facilitation). <br /><br />I empathize with some violent liberation movements, including the second Palestinian <em>intifada</em>. First World activists and peacebuilders run the risk of looking down our condescending noses at the actions of the oppressed without ethnographic studies of what caused such actions. However, phenomenologically, militarized strategies of liberation almost always reproduce the cycle which they sought to overthrow, because they are dependent on the same worldviewing and the same resources (eg. international arms trade) in order to resist empire. The result is more deaths and another repressive regime. As black lesbian feminist poet Audre Lorde said, “For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine transformation” (Lorde & Clarke, 2007, p. 112-3). For instance, the first Palestinian <em>intifada </em>was predominantly a concerted and mobilized nonviolent revolution, and it paved the way for the Oslo Peace Accords. However, in the aftermath of Oslo’s failure, the second violent <em>intifada </em>began in which suicide bombings drastically increased. Now, the situation on the ground is far worse than it was ten years ago with a massive concrete wall, intensified movement restrictions, and accelerated settlement construction. Because of this, I think the ends and the means must be as commensurate as possible.<br /><br />Speakin of which, are the roles of activist and carrier-catalyst incommensurate? For instance, could Lederach have negotiated with the government while also siding himself with the First Nation groups? As an intervener, I should not allocate legitimacy completely to one side. I do allocate legitimacy in some instances more to one side than the other, but sole legitimacy would blind me to the suffering and experience of the other, thus reproducing a cycle of violence. By taking sides without allocating sole legitimacy, Lederach could have still functioned as a carrier-catalyst (negotiation) and a bridge builder (trust building) in order to understand what the government was and was not willing to concede to the First Nation groups. As a conduit (active listening and deep communication), Lederach would also have filled the role of the seer (conflict analysis and diagnosis) for the First Nation groups by explaining how far the government would go. The resistance groups could then have made their decision how to respond. If the government’s main aim was to dissolve tension with no intention of compromising, such information would be vital to the strategies of the First Nation groups. As a carrier-catalyst and conduit, Lederach could have then communicated clearly to the government how far the First Nation groups were willing to go in response. As an outsider with such potential connections, Lederach could have enacted multiple parts. The insights gained from these connections could be relayed to the side which the intervener has taken, thus strengthening their position and possible responses. <br /><br />In such a situation, however, peacebuilders must guard against thinking they can become completely one with the oppressed. There may be some exceptions to this rule, because conversion can happen even while we recognize irreducible differences. In my experience, I have seen “the oppressed” welcome the outsider into their own midst as one of them, as an “other” who is now part of them. Lederach did not have enough time to do so in this situation, which could be part of the problem. As the situation stood, Lederach seemed to have two choices: either represent the First Nations or access them to government. I think some situations could arise in which the first choice is the more appropriate, but in this particular situation Lederach’s mission might have been more successful if he more proactively attempted to connect the First Nation groups to the powers that be so that their legitimate demands could be heard. The government’s willingness (or lack thereof) to cooperate could have been articulated to the First Nation groups; as a conduit and a carrier-catalyst, Lederach could have filled this vital niche. As a seer, I think it would have been appropriate for him to predict what might occur if the current violent resistance escalated, especially considering the superior force and resources of the government. <br /><br />If presented with a similar scenario, I don’t know what decisions I would have made. My experiences in nonviolent intervention were ad hoc, rooted in the crisis of the moment and the obligation to respond. We had no time to plan or to train, and the important roles of conflict intervention were messily inhabited as we broke bread around a table under the specter of military night raids. At times, this is the only possible response: the willingness to place our political bodies in the midst of the body politic.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />References<br /><br />Lorde, A. & Clarke, C (ed.). (2007). <em>Sister outsider: Essays and speeches</em>. Berkeley: Crossing Press. <br />Jonathan McRayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11320785725421810116noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2118802837677828648.post-67675080419488230792011-11-29T10:28:00.002-06:002011-11-29T10:30:39.364-06:00Mediation ReflectionThe practice of mediation is considered one of the central tools for peacebuilders. Mediation, along with negotiation and facilitation, form the backbone of CJP’s conflict transformation ethos, due in part to the plethora of faculty members who have been involved with the Mennonite Central Committee. But mediation, like negotiation, is also a common skill, albeit an unrefined one; as James Joyce would have it, mediation is a chaosmos, an order which is unsettled by the disorder it seeks to direct. We often facilitate conflict between family members or friends, acting as middlemen (or women) relaying messages and summarizing underlying needs. The trick is to unearth this unrecognized daily practice and recognize its distinctive methods. Mediation is the structured emergence of difference that creates space for potential convergence. <br /><br />Unfortunately, I have been somewhat skeptical of mediation. I never doubted the vital importance of it in certain circumstances but I wondered how applicable it was in many situations, especially when it became extremely specialized and professionalized. In my limited view, mediators whitewashed severe inequities and power imbalances by claiming neutrality, leading some to boast they could mediate anything, presumably even racial or economic conflicts. Major nations send mediators like George Mitchell to facilitate the (laughably named) Middle East peace process, who inevitably fail because they enter assuming, or pretending, that two equal parties sit at the table. And when Palestinians refuse to concede on certain issues, the mediators complain that they aren’t giving up enough ground. But how do you give ground when you don’t have much to give? How do you give ground when you believe that most of your ground was taken by the party with whom you’re supposed to be negotiating?<br /><br />I worked with a reconciliation group based in Jerusalem. Musalaha does important work, including mediation work. In the vein of narrative mediation, Musalaha recognizes the vitality of storytelling in which an encounter with the other is unavoidable. That important work, however, is endlessly challenging and frustrating because they are handcuffed by a desire to appease exceedingly conflicting groups. In the midst of my frustration I recognized that Musalaha attempts to walk a string-thin line. They are in an extremely volatile situation as a non-profit organization funded mostly by Evangelical Christians, many of whom still ardently sympathize with Israel but also want to help “Arab Christians.” The director, an Israeli Palestinian, says he has “an itch for justice” and is ready for Musalaha to speak more boldly. But if Palestinian participants cry justice for their beloved country too loudly, most Israelis won’t come. However, if Musalaha continues a more neutral stance on political issues, Palestinians will consider that stance as normalizing the occupation and they may not come much longer either. In this case, the process of mediation transforms some individual lives, which cannot be underestimated, but those individual lives return to extreme societal and structural disparities separated by a dividing wall of hostility and concrete.<br /> <br />During this time, once or twice a week several friends of mine and I slept in the home of a nonviolent protest leader outside of Bethlehem because of the regular occurrence of IDF night raids. Apparently, they came to the village regularly, and came while we slept there but never came to the house. Not until we missed a night. Our friend was later taken into a back room at a checkpoint crossing and was beaten for ten or fifteen minutes before being released. Israeli soldiers had the protest leader’s cellphone number, calling him regularly to request visits in his front yard to work things out over tea. The protest leader said that by inviting them for tea he would be accepting the present power inequality in which they could come at will and armed to his home. When the wall fell and the occupation ended, then he would invite them. <br /><br />Coworkers in the reconciliation group were skeptical of my involvement with nonviolent intervention, direct action, and journalistic advocacy. An activist friend angrily reprimanded me for working with a reconciliation group, all of which she claimed hide behind neutrality and historical amnesia; this friend reprimanded me for this as we drove out to the village to sleep in the protest leader’s home. These experiences, as well as daily crossing through the checkpoints in the separation wall, convinced me that direct action and mediation are both needed. But they manifest themselves in different contexts in which one practice may be inappropriate. Activists sometimes forget that conversation is a desired result of direct action; the table is made more accessible for all. Mediators sometimes forget that makers of peace must often be disturbers of peace. Governments idolize King and Gandhi now that they are dead, but they were vilified as troublemakers and verbally and physically attacked when alive. Mediation has an important place, but cannot be the only core of peacebuilding. It is a backup when negotiation fails because of entrenched ideologies, and nonviolent direct action replaces failed mediation processes. Both channel energy and turn up unheard voices. As Ched Myers and Elaine Enns have said, the two are estranged relatives. <br /><br />I took my role as a mediator seriously during role-playing sessions and I tried to practice the discussed skills. I have acted as a sort of mediator for friends in dispute, but surveying the field provided a more stable framework in which to work. Part of the beauty of mediation is the interpretability of methods that allows for diverse engagement with the process, whether that is traditional, transformative, narrative, victim-offender, or community mediation. The word chaosmos came to mind several times during the process of mediating and being mediated: a mediator must extensively plan and organize, but must also be open to the unpredictability of human encounter. The mediation process may shed light on unexpected emotions and details that could never have been predicted, even in a role-play situation. This highlighted the fact that mediators do not control the process but instead facilitate it, direct it. In a way, mediators conduct the flux toward an acceptable rhythm. One observer commented that mediators play the role of encourager by soliciting generative ideas from participants. The ownership belongs to the participants and the mediator, in a way, plays stupid so that participants are forced to constantly reshape and reform experiences and emotions. Instead of being the all-knowing third party, the mediator elicits different aspects of repeated stories by assuming ignorance. This forces the participants to continually clarify desires and perspectives. And, unlike negotiation, a third party is able to rephrase previously entrenched views that might make listening and understanding more possible. <br /> <br />My valuation of mediation rose during the class role-playing sessions. I hope to complete the required hours at the Fairfield Center and explore community and narrative mediation in more depth. Conflict will inevitably arise and the skill to stimulate discussion, facilitate listening, and to construct more collaborative environments is critical. And to do all of this without controlling and manipulating the process or the people involved. Mediation is the art of asking the right questions and the art of shared storytelling. In many ways, these are lost arts that must be restored.Jonathan McRayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11320785725421810116noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2118802837677828648.post-83086393430120461222011-11-14T11:40:00.002-06:002011-11-14T11:41:24.053-06:00Cosmopolitanism and Bioregionalism: Reflection on Contemporary Conflict ResolutionHugh Miall, Oliver Ramsbotham, and Tom Woodhouse have produced a remarkable and thorough resource for reflective practitioners. <em>Contemporary Conflict Resolution </em>is an ambitious attempt to explore the history, practices, and critiques of the field. I felt compelled to read beyond the assigned chapters because of the multiplicity of important topics. Indeed, the volume is so broad and expansive that the task of reflecting on it is extremely daunting. Too many possible trails diverge in this dense wood. <br /><br />Cosmopolitan conflict resolution is the central theme of the massive book (Ramsbotham, 2011, p. 265), the deepest level of which is conflict transformation (<em>ibid</em>, pp. 31-32). This well-articulated approach is based on cooperation (<em>ibid</em>, p. 20). However, the current global economic and political structures engender extreme competition, centralization, and stratification. Interestingly, the authors adamantly praise the United Nations as the pinnacle of cosmopolitan conflict resolution (<em>ibid</em>, pp. 273-4), which depends on the aforementioned structures (<em>ibid</em>, p. 272). The authors defend the United Nations from detractors throughout the book (<em>ibid</em>, p. 291), which is indeed admirable and appropriate at times. But they do so by propagating global citizenship in a world community (ibid, p. 396). This appears reasonable, but becomes problematic when cosmopolitanism remains comfortable with mere reform of the state system (<em>ibid</em>, p. 399). <br /><br />Reform is certainly not a four-letter word, and is absolutely necessary at times, but many historians claim that state-making has served, not to protect people from violence as Hobbes would contend (<em>ibid</em>, pp. 95-96), but to organize for the purpose of war (Alexis-Baker, 2011). Rather than paving the way for the world community, nation-states disintegrated communities (<em>ibid</em>). Indeed, European peasants staged major rebellions, causing some of the most tumultuous periods in European history (Ramsbotham, 2011, p. 275), during the infancy of the nation-state when leaders introduced uniform language and currency over huge territories (Alexis-Baker, 2011). <br /><br />The Occupy Wall Street movement is resisting similar trends within liberal democracy, in effect agreeing with the authors’ critique of the internal democratic peace theory (Ramsbotham, 2011, p. 280). Liberal democracies bifurcated the political and economic systems, in which the supposed equality of the former actually supports structural inequality in the latter (Myers, 1994, p. 294). Many Americans, even poor Americans, seem to have accepted this division and forfeited economic or political transformation because Horatio Algers’ bootstrap tales are still so prevalent.<br /><br />The authors of this textbook have internalized another tale which believes that international law and human rights can be normalized in a convergence of state interests that will ultimately transform the current systems (Ramsbotham, 2011, p. 280). This strikes me as “an admittedly overoptimistic ‘long history of the state’ in terms of the development of international norms” (<em>ibid</em>, p. 275) and an extremely positivist view of historical progress (<em>ibid</em>, p. 267, 269), a view which has caused inestimable violence to the indigenous people of the West, to non-Westerners, and to women of all races (Caputo, 2006, p. 38). The UN did not prevent the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, nor have they ever effectively constrained Israel, who easily ignores UN resolutions without any fear of repercussion. Israel is an example of a rejection of the liberal cosmopolitan values and principles which the authors religiously endorse (<em>ibid</em>, p. 411), but the authors main example of rejection is Wahhabist Muslims who cannot accept liberal democracy because majority opinion might outvote the will of Allah (<em>ibid</em>, p. 411). The authors fear this rejection of cosmopolitanism, but is it fundamentally different from Israel’s stance or even from American conscientious objectors? Even if the majority votes for war, which they do through tax dollars and presidential votes, conscientious objectors reject majority opinion within a liberal democracy. The authors’ viewpoint thus orients them back to military force in order to impose liberal democratic cosmopolitan values (<em>ibid</em>, p. 327), even though just war criteria have never prevented any war. Is the role of the peacebuilder ultimately to control the flow of history? Could there be a difference between <em>controlling </em>and <em>leavening</em>? <br /><br />Liberal human rights and international law are incredibly important references and tools, but they often seem shallow when compared to deep cultural reservoirs of human folly and wisdom (discussed in chapter fifteen). Certainly these reservoirs can be dangerous because of their endless interpretability. However, this is no less the case for the text of human rights, whose staunchest advocates think such rights are universal. But nothing cultural is really universal, which is why people spend so much time arguing for human rights, or rather evangelizing for them. I am not necessarily against ‘evangelism’ for justice and peacemaking, but I tend to think that interpretability is what gives texts their life, and I tend to think that universality emerges from the plurality of particularity, not from an indistinct uniformity. Part of the irony is that many peacebuilders insist on abstract formulations like “the family of nations” or “the world community” (<em>ibid</em>, p. 266, 396) and then also posit human rights as the basis for all relationships. But healthy families and communities are not centered on rights; they are centered on responsibility to other members. In a way, solely rights-based approaches can devalue communal interdependence by operating on individualistic assumptions: instead of active and responsible participation, we get de-personalized laws of non-infringement. Some have argued that such laws were actually designed to dismantle social groups into more manageable individuals (Alexis-Baker, 2011). Again, I am certainly not rejecting the significant tool of human rights, and they may be transitionally necessary in a world of global economics and nation-states. But I am suggesting that they may not be all-sufficient. In the end, stories are all we have.<br /><br />No system will ever be perfect, but are we able to even imagine alternatives such as bioregionalism? Bioregionalism is a political, economic, and cultural way of life defined by ecological boundaries such as watersheds and soil types, rather than arbitrary state lines. We are members of specific communities within specific ecosystems, not of some amorphous world community. However, these specific communities are irrevocably connected to other specific communities and require participation and cooperation and therefore preventing devolution into tiny isolate enclaves. Bioregionalism thus takes very seriously “post-structural concerns for local participation and human diversity” (Ramsbotham, 2011, p. 267).<br /><br />What might a cosmopolitan bioregionalism look like? The textbook authors are rightly committed to pluralism (<em>ibid</em>, p. 396-399), but for some reason think that global governance can deliver locally defined welfare for the most marginalized (ibid, p. 397). While perhaps possible, the authors don’t adequately explain how global governance, presumably under UN administration, would prevent homogenization and “top-down forces of militarist, market-driven, materialist globalization” (<em>ibid</em>, p. 398). The earth itself is capable of cultivating pluralism, witnessed in natural biodiversity, but it is also able to limit and ground it (Myers, 1994, p. 364). Theoretically, placing economics under the control of bioregional knowledge would foster cooperation because everyone would be dependent on resource stewardship of that place; however, abolishing centralized authority (whether the nation-state government or the UN), does not automatically instigate inter-regional warfare over territory. The textbook authors note that real commons did not predominantly end in tragedy because people mostly cooperated by regulating competition and restricting freedom (Ramsbotham, 2011, pp. 294-295). Bioregional governance requires a networked confederation of local groups to plan, cooperate, trade, mediate, and share knowledge (Myers, 1994, p. 366). <br /><br />Bioregionalism is one imaginable alternative that can even be planted within the shell of existing structures. The chapter on environmental conflict resolution (Ramsbotham, 2011, pp. 293-304) introduces extremely important issues such as climate change, peak oil, resource competition, and the survival of the marginalized (<em>ibid</em>, p. 293). The authors relate important examples such as a Californian water conflict (ibid, p. 295), but they would have benefited significantly from discussing the potential of permaculture as a form of peacebuilding. Rooted in ecological science and systems theory (Holmgren, 2004, p. 4) as well as community research, religious traditions, and native cultures of place (<em>ibid</em>, p. 6), permaculture is a form of land and cultural design and management that stems from three interrelated ethical maxims: “Care for the earth (husband soil, forests and water)”; “Care for people (look after self, kin and community)”; and “Fair share (set limits to consumption and reproduction, and redistribute surplus)” (<em>ibid</em>, p. 6). Furthermore, the word permaculture not only means permanent and sustainable agriculture but also permanent and sustainable culture (<em>ibid</em>, p. 1). A brief example is Bustan Qaraaqa, a community permaculture farm located in Beit Sahour, a village close to Bethlehem, Palestine. The farm addresses food insecurity and environmental degradation that result from infrastructural instability and a military occupation. Through education and demonstration, the farm models cheap and easy ways to live sustainably and produce food such as water conservation, aquaponics systems, tree planting, and will soon include waste management and fish farming.<br /><br />On a final note, the authors could have strengthened their helpful survey (Ramsbotham, 2011, p. 294) by mentioning Cuba. The Caribbean country plummeted into economic crisis after the fall of the Soviet Union (Rosset & Bourque, 2005, p. 363). Fossil fuel availability drastically decreased, as well as food imports which dropped by more than fifty percent; Cuban agriculture lost seventy percent of available fertilizers and pesticides (<em>ibid</em>, p. 364). Daily caloric intake in the early 1990s dropped by thirty percent from the 1980s (<em>ibid</em>, p. 364). Remarkably, Cuba survived and thrived in the aftermath of their initial catastrophe by employing alternative technologies, returning to animal instead of mechanical traction, remembering older techniques (such as intercropping, crop rotations, and composting), and supplementing limited synthetic fertilizers with agroecological practices such as biopesticides and biofertilizers, natural enemies, earthworms, green manures and cover crops, and integration of grazing animals (<em>ibid</em>, p. 364). <br /><br />The government simultaneously converted almost all state farms into worker-owned cooperatives, acknowledging that farm managers’ must be “intimately familiar with the ecological heterogeneity” of the land (<em>ibid</em>, p. 365). Individual farms (<em>ibid</em>, p. 364) and these worker-owned cooperatives represent a fascinating synthesis of capitalism and socialism. Urban farming played a central role in overcoming food insecurity (<em>ibid</em>, pp. 365-366), flipping conventional wisdom on its back by proving that small countries can feed themselves, even without copious synthetic fertilizers and corporate-scale farms (<em>ibid</em>, p. 366). Cuban practices such as agroecology, fair prices, land redistribution, local production, and urban farming are very applicable elsewhere (<em>ibid</em>, p. 367). Cuba emerges as a key example of an alternative paradigm that addresses extreme environmental and social challenges (Ramsbotham, 2011, p. 293) and is a paradigm, along with bioregionalism, that has definite resonances with the important insights of cosmopolitan conflict resolution (<em>ibid</em>, p. 32). <br /><br /><br /><br />References<br /><br />Alexis-Baker, A. (2011). <em>The myth of state as savior and elections as a confession of faith</em>. Retrieved November 9, 2011, from Jesus Radicals.<br />site: <a href="http://www.jesusradicals.com/the-myth-of-the-state-as-savior-and-elections-as-confession-of-faith/ ">http://www.jesusradicals.com/the-myth-of-the-state-as-savior-and-elections-as-confession-of-faith/ </a><br /><br />Caputo, J. (2006). <em>Philosophy and theology</em>. Nashville: Abingdon Press.<br /><br />Holmgren, D. (2004). <em>Essence of permaculture</em>. Retrieved June 30, 2011, from Holmgren <br />Design Services Website: http://www.holmgren.com.au/ <br /><br />Myers. C. (1994). <em>Who will roll away the stone?: Discipleship queries for first world christians</em>. Maryknoll: Orbis Books.<br /><br />Ramsbotham, O., Woodhouse, T., and Miall, H. (2011). <em>Contemporary conflict resolution</em> (3rd ed.). Malden: Polity Press. <br /><br />Rosset, P, & Bourque, M. (2005). Lessons of Cuban resistance. In J. Pretty (ed.), <em>The Earthscan reader in sustainable agriculture</em> (pp. 362-367). Sterling: Earthscan. Jonathan McRayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11320785725421810116noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2118802837677828648.post-14411852313716238832011-10-24T10:59:00.002-05:002011-10-24T11:02:52.965-05:00The Nature of Science in Sustainable AgricultureScience inhabits an important niche in sustainable agriculture. This niche functions in several related ways. <br /><br />Firstly, science produces measurements and provides demonstration. We may observe that carrots and tomatoes, squash and corn, lettuce and walnut husks, grow better together, or that polyculture is more productive than monoculture, but a scientific approach quantifies the increase in yield and the benefit to the system as a whole. In this way, science conducts tests in the particularity of each agroecosystem. <br /><br />Secondly, science can offer credibility and argumentation. Many in Western societies, from skeptics to the disinterested, will more likely believe statistical analysis of a formal experiment than cultural tradition or experiential observation. By offering tested data, science serves to convince a public predisposed to quantification by illuminating the credibility of sustainable agriculture. Furthermore, accepted mainstream science has endorsed the agricultural status quo, so one role of science in sustainable agriculture is argumentation in the arena of hypotheses. Also, case studies from other countries in which sustainable practices have been employed for centuries are given credibility by measurements and demonstrations.<br /><br />Thirdly, science deepens understandings and of ecological rhythms which sustainable agriculture strives to imitate. In this way, different fields of science establish a mosaic of knowledge which undergirds sustainable agricultural practices. Rather than preoccupation with universality, this deepened understanding focuses on the local context, therefore encouraging participation in bioregional processes. Science therefore enables the farmer to partner with the natural processes of a certain place in order to maximize yield and to preserve the place’s health into the foreseeable future. <br /><br />As such, sustainable farmers practice numerous kinds of science, including (among many others) ecology, agronomy, biology, climatology, physiology, hydrology, and even nutrition. Extensive training in all these fields is not required for a farmer to be sustainable, but aspects and insights from each will be present in the work itself. Also, sustainable farmers will literally be involved in field work as opposed to laboratories and test-tube experiments: their work will be exposed to and incorporate natural disturbances. Because of this, sustainable farmers will not employ some universal step-by-step scientific method because each agroecosystem is distinct and requires intentional and contextual interaction that cannot be achieved through prepackaged methodologies. However, farmers will utilize different scientific methods depending on their context, even depending on different locations within their farms. An assortment of methods will emerge based on the needs and the gifts of the particular place. Observation and context are pivotal in scientific methods. <br /><br />These methods of science in sustainable agriculture will be the same as the nature of science. Agricultural science will be <em>empirical</em>, based on observations of and experiences in the ecosystems on the farm and the ecosystems in which the farm is located. It will be <em>inferential</em>, which means it will make claims about those observations. For instance, a farmer may observe that certain crops are no longer wilted and may then infer that this is due to efficient distribution of rainwater collection or to the addition of mulching that retains moisture content in the topsoil. Agricultural science will also be <em>theory-laden</em>; nothing occurs in a vacuum and so farmers will be biased by values and training. A farmer with an agronomic background may posit everything as a soil management problem, while a farmer with education in physiology may first look to the individual plant as the most important factor. Because this is inevitable (and not altogether bad), diversifying the disciplines by recognizing their interdependence becomes vital. Additionally, agricultural will be <em>socially and culturally conditioned</em>. All scientists are partially determined by the values, practices, and perceptions of their own culture. Agricultural scientists will grow certain types of crops, employ certain types of technology, conduct certain types of experiments, and respond with certain types of native techniques depending on their culture’s standards and ethics. In another way, sustainable agricultural science will be socially bound by recognizing its connection to other social practices such as economics, politics, and religion. Agricultural science will also be socially and culturally conditioned because it will take seriously the health of human and nonhuman communities in that place, as well as learning from the folly and wisdom embedded in cultural traditions. <br /><br />And agricultural science will be <em>tentative </em>and therefore subject to evolution. Ecosystems exhibit a dynamic equilibrium and so agricultural science must embrace and adapt to that dynamism. Agricultural science will also be tentative because it will be open to knowledge from the plurality of other places in the world.Jonathan McRayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11320785725421810116noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2118802837677828648.post-49202564034025022152011-10-21T08:49:00.002-05:002011-10-21T08:54:14.739-05:00The Body Politic: Gilligan's Preventing ViolenceMost of my classmates cannot stop singing praises about James Gilligan’s <em>Preventing Violence</em>. To a large extent, I can relate. Gilligan’s exposition on the multi-determined nature of violence (Gilligan, 2001, p. 67) is captivating and compelling. Many of his conclusions in some way support my convictions of community, nonviolence, the convergence of interpersonal and structural transformation, and the inherent structural problems of our collective house. He puts the future as starkly as did MLK: either we learn to live, and want to live, together or we die (p. 9). I also related to Gilligan’s doubt: he makes clear that he is not at all optimistic that the United States will heed his theory and generate the political and economic will to restructure our lives (p. 26); charting out a course to prevent violence does not mean we will set sail. I do not feel much optimism or idealism at all anymore, but I cannot shake deep convictions and, in some ways, a sense of obligation. Now that I have seen and encountered, I cannot ignore.<br /><br />Gilligan’s public health approach (p. 12) is tremendously helpful, attempting to explicate causes and responses from a phenomenological perspective rather than a strictly <em>a priori</em> theoretical basis. Because he recognizes the biological, psychological, and social determinants of violence, he also acknowledges different levels of prevention (p. 20), which correspond with John Paul Lederach’s levels of intervention in <em>Building Peace</em>. Both Lederach and Gilligan accept the necessity of a diversity of gifts and a multiplicity of engagement aimed at diving as deep as possible. Like Hercules fighting the Hydra monster, we can chop down destructive systems forever, but they will continually grow back like biting heads unless we tend to the root. In this etymological sense, Gilligan’s diagnosis and prognosis is subversively radical. Furthermore, he won me over with his strong references to literature, such as Woolf, Shakespeare, and Genesis (p. 57, 8). More peacebuilders must begin to take these deep reservoirs of human folly and wisdom much more seriously. Such cultural traditions, like the social sciences, are extremely important disciplines that we cannot ignore. <br /><br />Upon critical reflection, I have my share of questions with some of Gilligan’s points and assumptions. Gilligan’s impressive theory is that violence revolves around shame (p. 29) and that the purpose of violence is to coerce respect from others (p. 35). I put on Gilligan’s glasses and was amazed to see how many acts of violence could indeed be traced to shame and the desire for respect. Even playful insults often result in a jocular retaliatory punch in order to save face. While extraordinarily insightful, Gilligan’s theory stems from studies limited to U.S. prisons, which are situated in a Western society. I wonder if his theory can be translated into every culture and every violent situation. For instance, I see a strong correlation between this theory and Israel/Palestine and the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but how does shame-based violence relate to U.S. incursions into Latin America, or funding rebel groups in Mozambique, or the first Gulf War? The danger of a fantastic theory is that it can become just another universal language, another meta-narrative. Interestingly, Gilligan critiques just such a tendency in the medieval concept of evil, which people viewed as an objective reality with an existence independent of subjective experience (p. 14). I think Gilligan has almost replaced “evil” with “shame.” He does not apply shame in the same way he claims medievalists did evil, but he seems to view it as the objective reality which lurks beneath every act of violence. I am hesitant to make such a statement, as possible as it may be. <br /><br />Gilligan’s phrase “traditional <em>moral </em>and <em>legal </em>approach” (p. 7) is misleading. His prevailing argument is against the contemporary industrial criminal justice system, an argument with which I agree. But that system is not traditional. If, by traditional, he means “what we’ve had for awhile,” such explicitness would be understood and welcome, because equating this present system with the past four thousand years seems untenable. Indeed, he actually notes restorative justice as an alternative (p. 8), which is often inspired by ancient traditional practices, whether from Native Americans, Maoris, or Palestinian Jews.<br /> <br />While I also have problems with moralistic language, Gilligan’s definition of morality is overly negative (p. 18). He seems to think that empiricism is the right framework (p. 12) because it is somehow objective, which means divorced from morality. But observation does not occur without some value-claims. The binary opposition between morality and empiricism is somewhat unhelpful, and it is not necessarily true: our values shape our perceptions and perceptions shape our values. This is an inevitable cycle of mutualism that seems better to embrace than ignore, especially since Gilligan’s training as a psychiatrist illuminates his predisposition to a public health approach (p. 12). As I suggested earlier, his phenomenological lens, which utilizes the social sciences and recognizes “real consequences for real people” (p. 13), is important and resonates very deeply with me, but this is not a separate endeavor from philosophizing. Social sciences can be just as abstract as some philosophy; they contribute an essential voice, but if we take seriously our personal and societal biases we will not claim that they unveil the real perspective. Pitting empiricism against morality implicitly states that we can completely free ourselves from interpretive lenses and see things as they really are. While we cannot and should not reject phenomenology (something which I hold dear), we can and should accept our contingencies and the values that leaven our observations. <br /><br />Gilligan offers a valid observation of militarism by sardonically suggesting that one murder leads to prison while thousands of murders earn the office of president or the emperor’s crown (p. 59); the highest honor given in the United States is the Congressional Medal of Honor, which is awarded to men for doing violence, for turning themselves and other men into objects of each other’s violence (p. 59). Gilligan in effect blunts this incisive critique by reframing military violence as necessary sacrifice for the sake of comrades and for the sake of all of us (p. 59). Gilligan therefore ends up supporting what he just exposed. Gilligan is very critical about the structural violence of American society, but he retreats from fully applying that critique to a major manifestation of socially-accepted, and socially-endorsed, violence. I am not at all interested in demonization, but if preventing violence is a prerequisite for human survival (p. 26), then militarism cannot be easily excused from the table. Intellectual honesty might require that people’s toes get stepped on at times.<br /><br />I respectfully step on Gilligan’s toes when he addresses technology and economics. He actually makes an anarcho-primitivist critique when he claims that our hierarchical division of society did not exist before the dawn of the civilization (p. 104) in hunter-gatherer societies (p. 89). Indeed, one could argue that communities like the Hutterites (p. 86) and the kibbutzim (p. 87), examples of ways to create less violent societies, attempt to re-imagine a Paleolithic ethos in the modern world. Gilligan believes, however, that civilization no longer requires stratifications, such as slavery, because of progress (p. 104). Apparently, Gilligan thinks progress replaces human manual labor with robots so that we are free to engage in more productive endeavors (p. 105). I do think appropriate technologies have an important role, and I absolutely agree that we do not need economic stratifications, but I question that this will be achieved by producing more technology that eradicates human engagement. Gilligan’s faith in technological progression seems intimately tied to forms of violence: utter reliance on nonrenewable fossil fuels and the violence to the earth and its human and nonhuman communities. <br /><br />Perhaps this exposes another component of violence: the devaluation of the body and the alienation of work. I don’t think Europeans enslaved Africans because they were black; they enslaved Africans because Africans were economically expedient and militarily unimposing. They could be forced to do the work that Europeans did not want to do and racism justified everything. Replacing slaves with technology will not guarantee the end of resource wars, much less the end of violence. I don’t know exactly in what direction we should move, but I think ancient cultural wisdom might at least provide one interpretation of ways forward. The early monastic communities believed, as Gilligan seems to note, that the project of civilization is constructed on the centralization of exploitation and wealth; if that is the case, then communities should become as self-sufficient as possible (Myers, 1994, p. 182). Furthermore, they claimed that exploitation and wealth stratification stem from the alienation of human labor, which I think relate to a devaluation of the body; in order to restore dignity and respect (as opposed to humiliation and shame), they centered their communal lives around shared manual, and therefore unalienated, work (p. 182). Critical questions can be asked here, but I wonder if the dualism between body and soul plays a larger role in violence than is often credited. If it does, reclaiming the tangibility and localness of the body, and therefore the body’s interdependence with other bodies, is a way of preventing violence in an increasingly virtual age. Nonviolence is a part of this reclamation, because engaged nonviolence affirms the actual embodiment of humanity, recognizing the strategic and subversive placement of the political body within the body politic. The two are inextricably linked. <br /> <br /><br /><br />References<br /><br />Gilligan, J. (2001). <em>Preventing violence</em>. New York: Thames & Hudson. <br /><br />Myers, C. (1994). <em>Who will roll away the stone?: Discipleship queries for first world Christians.</em> Maryknoll: Orbis Books.Jonathan McRayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11320785725421810116noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2118802837677828648.post-2810505313013698512011-09-26T09:36:00.002-05:002011-09-26T09:42:36.194-05:00Agricultural SustainabilitySustainability is an extremely elusive concept: the more one tries to define it the more it slips through one’s fingers. The word seems, as a rule, more general than specific. But it is largely abstract because definitions are often place-less. Definitions have no <em>particular place </em>in mind in which sustainability can put roots down and stick around for awhile. Certainly some generality is necessary, but without particularity holding this generality down it will float away. Applicability is key.<br /><br />The original Brundtland definition was too abstract and overly anthropocentric. To be fair, anthropocentrism is not necessarily bad: a jellyfish would be medusacentric. And Brundtland’s and Robert Solow’s neoliberal economics are not the only manifestation of anthropocentrism. Wendell Berry could be considered anthropocentric because he is endlessly passionate about the life and health of human communities. But he is also deeply biocentric because he realizes that human life and health cannot come at the expense of what sustains it and because it cannot come at the expense of the life and health of our home and our nonhuman neighbors, who surely have just as much, if not more, of a right to live on this planet as we do. This synthesis is fertile ground for defining sustainability<br /><br />A good definition of agricultural sustainability will be so burdened with adjectives that any speaker will trip over it. Ecology, the study of the household, is vital in this discussion, because it connotes the complex relationships of mutuality between various parts to create the whole. Health does not exist in isolation, but in beneficial membership to the entire household. Any definition that is worth its salt will recognize the complex relatedness between social, political, economic, ecological, and cultural issues. If the house is divided against itself it will not stand. <br /><br />Agricultural sustainability imitates the diverse patterns and relationships of local ecosystems in order to sustain human and nonhuman communities in a particular place for as long as possible. Imitation is an important distinction: agricultural sustainability does not necessarily seek to <em>recreate </em>local ecosystems, but instead seeks to <em>emulate </em>local ecosystems. As such, it makes ends and means as commensurate as possible: it will not impede the land’s inherent ability for renewal and it will reduce (and ultimately eliminate) dependence on non-renewable energy except as a rare supplement. Agricultural sustainability contextually emerges from the study and practice of the whole household, characterized by self-renewal and restoration, stability and mutability, rootedness and longevity. It conserves and preserves biodiversity, soil fertility, watershed integrity, and sociocultural equity while maintaining a sustaining yield. Agricultural sustainability is bioregional and organic, which means it fosters community and culture, respects the limitations and gifts of carrying capacity, and defects as much as possible from dependence on an exploitive economy. It necessitates revitalized communities to care for the land, which should be redistributed into more cooperative ownerships or so people have the opportunity to work productive land (which is not just a Jeffersonian vision, but also a biblical-prophetic one and a distributist-economic one). Urban farming and the gardening of cities must also play a key creative role. None of this will happen overnight with the flick of a magic wand. Agricultural sustainability is a dynamic conversion. <br /><br />Agricultural sustainability requires storytelling, consciously and critically joining the wisdom of the past with concrete practices in the present to address the potential of the future. As such, it builds up local tradition and culture like topsoil that preserves wisdom but also invites, indeed requires, future inputs and improvements. Marginal places and people must be welcomed in reconstituted communities and restructured systems that also imitate ecosystems (balance, resilience, vitality, diversity, mutuality, etc.) and harmonize with local ecosystems. Neighborliness will be emphasized. Limits must be set on production and consumption, which means that the ratio of farmer to acreage must be decreased. Distribution of surplus will be important as well, because distribution of food poses a greater threat to sustainability than the production of food.<br /><br />As humans, we must address our needs, but we must do so with the realization that we are not the only, or indeed the most important, species inhabiting this planet. Evolution (and some religious traditions) bears witness to our interconnectedness and interdependence with the earth and fellow creatures. This tension will be a tightrope that cannot be walked in the abstract but only in responsible concrete practices. Sustainable agriculture is the mediator between the health of human culture and the health of the earth because it depends on the permanent renewal of both. Jonathan McRayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11320785725421810116noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2118802837677828648.post-61590338326610929832011-09-23T23:56:00.002-05:002011-09-24T00:00:55.517-05:00Conflict Transformation Style AssessmentPersonality profile tests are tricky for me. Not necessarily because they require limiting labels (as if human beings can, or should, escape limitations), but because they deal out de-contextualized situations and prefabricated options. The profile did prove useful, but as I took it I wanted to know what subject was being discussed in the group, who my fellow groups members were, where we were having the discussion, etc. The context would greatly determine my role within it and my response to it. <br /><br />Even so, I find it interesting that my adjudicated style, Affiliating/Perfecting, is considered the activist style, something with which I resonate. I am committed to the grassroots and middle-range sectors of peacebuilding, to place and to people, and this style seems appropriate for these commitments. In our corner enclave of similarly-profiled classmates, we discussed common themes of our (past and future) work: strong values, willingness to question authority, cooperation, passion, engagement, loyalty, etc. Unfortunately, perverted manifestations of these convictions can breed elitism and even hatefulness, arrogantly dividing the world into good guys and bad guys with little room for nuance or critical questions. There is a fine line between confronting dehumanization and dehumanizing those you confront. That fine line, however, is a tightrope that must be walked: sides must be taken, because neutrality votes for the oppressor. But activists must stand firm on unsettled ground, because we can never be smugly certain, as if we are sole recipients of the Revelation of Absolute Truth. Ironically, this ambiguity embraces convicted action, but action seasoned with interrogatory ethics: asking questions of the systems and structures of the world while simultaneously asking the same questions of ourselves, exposing our own contingencies and construction. Such an ethics, so needed in every conflict transformation style, would be radical in the etymological sense of the word: routing out the roots of our socioeconomic and political injustices and retrieving the roots of our sustaining and subversive stories. In this radicalism, the synthesis of loving our neighbors and loving our enemies is vital.<br /><br />As classmates in other groups shared their styles and experiences, distinctive lines blurred like a gradual shading of color into color, each style contributing to a mosaic of peacebuilders. Instead of differences dominated by hierarchy and distrust, a diversity of gifts emerged characterized by the collaboration of organizers, facilitators, analyzers, reconcilers, and activists. Indeed, I saw myself in several other styles, since my work has required harmonizing, directing, and certainly analyzing. But the energy for my commitment to marginalized and dispossessed people and places has come more from an “affiliating/perfecting” spirit, from an activist bent, which has grown from deep roots in my life. <br /><br />I grew up in the Appalachian Mountains of Tennessee, one of the poorest areas of the United States, where my father was a family doctor working with a community healthcare center, clinic, and hospital dedicated to the uninsured. My family has also crafted a close connection to Israel and Palestine over the past forty years. Like many American Christians, my family championed Israel despite knowing little about the Palestinian perspective, even though we had Palestinian friends for as long as we had Israeli friends. Over the last ten years, however, my family’s perspective on the conflict has progressively shifted (perhaps due in part to an interrogatory ethic) from one of steadfast support of Israel to an intimate connection with the plight of the Palestinians. I have worked as a journalist in Ramallah with the Palestine Monitor, a web-based news source committed to “exposing life under occupation.” I traveled throughout the West Bank, writing several articles about the village of Ni’lin, whose olive groves and roads were (and are) fractured due to the construction of the separation wall. I witnessed and engaged with villagers, as well as Israeli and international activists, nonviolently protesting the confiscation and devastation of their land. And I watched and felt the effects as police and military repeatedly responded with teargas, rubber-coated bullets, and live fire. I served as a writer and editor with Musalaha (“reconciliation” in Arabic), which is committed to uniting Israeli Messianic Jews and Palestinian Christians. I was given a list of Israelis and Palestinians to interview and then incarnate my skeletal notes as stories about encounters with the other and events of reconciliation, which was published as a book in December. I also worked with the Al-Basma Center, a creative and restorative place for people with developmental disabilities. Through activities like olivewood carving, recycled card-making, weaving, making fuel from sawdust, a greenhouse, drama, speech therapy, and hygiene classes, the students are taught practical and artistic skills and the belief that they are vital members and contributors to their community. The marginalized of the marginalized are welcomed as fully human.<br /><br />These experiences, and my placement in the style assessment, highlight the necessity of praxis. Reflective practitioners understand the relatedness of conflict transformation styles, a relationship that advocates addressing root causes of violence, tending the connected branches of the peacemaking tree, and testing the soil of conflict and the inequitable distribution of power and privilege (Enns & Myers, 2009, p. 44). Unfortunately, activists sometimes lack the attentive patience and hospitable openness this requires. The subsequent danger of this style is burnout, the edge of which I have seen myself in only a short amount of time. This danger seems attributable to a wide variety of reasons, but I think certainly to a lack of familiarity with (or even respect for) the other branches of the tree, such as analyzing and preserving, accommodating and harmonizing. Also, in my experience activists often lack community. A group of individuals committed to the same goal or having the same conversation does not constitute community: they share nothing but ideas, which can be fleeting. Healthy activists and movements seem to be grounded in a sustaining community with shared space, time, resources, memories, values, and practices. Jean Vanier suggests that “To struggle for a cause it is best for people to be rooted in a community where they are learning reconciliation, acceptance of difference and of their own darkness, and how to celebrate . . . A community that does not celebrate is in danger of becoming just a group of people that get things done” (2010, p. 169, 97). Activists are so preoccupied with the future that they forget response-ability to the present moment. We need prophetic communities that microcosmically cultivate a restorative culture and imagine what the alternative future looks like right now.<br /><br />Similarly, activists can also emphasize ends too much. I might very easily burn out if I thought results were the most important thing, that my work will definitely achieve all my goals, that I can ‘save the world’ and ‘feed the hungry’ and ‘create world peace.’ To think on that scale, I would be forced to conjure up grand abstract schemes that might look eerily similar to those with grand abstract schemes to ‘take over the world.’ Both operate by massive top-level implementation which ironically necessitates destructively reductionist thinking. Clearly, ends can never be ignored, especially for those in the belly of the beast. And the end goal of nonviolent direct action is negotiation and, if possible, reconciliation. Means and ends must be as commensurate as possible. But idealism about achieving those ends will only sow seeds for cynicism, a common trait amongst activists I know (myself included). Idealism leads to abstraction which leads to failure which leads to burnout. Activists may need deeper and more concrete reasons than absolute assurance and quick realization of ends, which may or may not come. In the end, there may be no such thing as peace. In the end, there is only peacemaking.<br /><br /><br /><br />References<br /><br />Enns, E. and Myers, C. (2009). Ambassadors of Reconciliation Volume II: Diverse Christian <br />Practices of Restorative Justice and Peacemaking. Maryknoll: Orbis Books.<br /><br />Vanier, J., & Whitney-Brown, C. (ed.). (2010). Jean Vanier: Essential writings. Maryknoll: <br />Orbis Books. Jonathan McRayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11320785725421810116noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2118802837677828648.post-74038693884320788532011-09-21T21:15:00.000-05:002011-09-21T21:17:41.339-05:00A House Divided: Reflection on Lederach's Building PeaceI know someone who has hoped to make a career out of working in occupied Palestine. During a discussion about the imminent Palestinian bid for statehood, he quipped that, if the request succeeded, he might be out of a job before he even gets started. He probably meant it sardonically, but the implication seemed to be that a Palestinian state would solve everything, as if abject poverty, community disintegration, Muslim-Christian hostility, political infighting, ecological destruction, and IDF-mimicking police forces would just suddenly vanish in the wake of a salvific state. In the end, there may be no such thing as peace. In the end, there is only peacemaking.<br /><br />John Paul Lederach knows that peacebuilding must delve much deeper than statist perspectives (1997, p. xvi). I appreciated his acknowledgment of the symptomatic residue of structural and systemic diseases (ibid, p. 57). While the actual surface of conflict must be addressed (and, at times, must be addressed in the very moment in which the encounter summons us to respond), the root causes that grew into what we see must also be tended to; further still, the soil around the roots might need a little testing as well. Deformed roots will continue to sprout if we ignore infected soil. Imbalances of power and privilege make for uneven ground.<br /><br />I was treading on familiar ground when Lederach discussed reconciliation (ibid, p. 23-35). I served as a writer and editor with an organization called Musalaha, which means “reconciliation” in Arabic. Musalaha is committed to creating space for reconciliation (ibid, p. 29) between Israeli Messianic Jews and Palestinian Christians, hoping to then build bridges to the distant shores of mainstream society. Even so, Musalaha struggles to fully test the soil of conflict. While they do occasionally discuss historical harms and trauma, mercy and forgiveness are given a much bigger plot of land than truth and justice. Musalaha attempts to walk a string-thin line. They are in an extremely volatile situation as an NGO predominantly funded by Evangelical Christians, many of whom still ardently support Israel. The director (a Palestinian with Israeli citizenship) says he has “an itch for justice” and is ready for Musalaha to speak more boldly. However, if they cry justice for their beloved country too loudly, many Israelis won’t come to conferences and retreats. But if Musalaha continues a more neutral stance on political issues, Palestinians will consider their silence as normalizing the occupation and they may not come much longer either. There will be no peace without reconciliation through justice, which, as Cornel West reminds us, “is what love looks like in public” (Dillon, 2008). <br /><br />A friend of Lederach’s once exclaimed that truth, mercy, justice, and peace meet in a place called reconciliation (1997, p. 29). This spring, I worked with some of my closest friends in Mozambique at a resource center and organic farm called Malo Ga Kujilana (MGK), which in Chiyao means “place of reconciliation.” More literally, the name translates as “the place of coming together,” etymologically referring to the reparation of a marriage after separation. This actual place incarnates the reconciliation of people with their neighbors and of neighbors with the earth. MGK partners with local villages to nurture imagination and wholeness through sustainable agriculture, non-monetary micro-loans, nutrition programs, sanitation initiatives, storytelling, and living life well together. This concreteness seems absent in some peacebuilding discussions and programs. Lederach is right to emphasize partiality and advocacy (ibid, p. 50) because relationship is the alpha and omega of conflict and peace (ibid, p. 26) and must therefore have a specific locus (ibid, p. 29). In the effort to be socially relevant, peacebuilding may have lost some of that prophetic voice. Often, it seems, peacebuilders want to address root causes but don’t want to put down roots. I am not extremely sympathetic to conflict junkies: transience breeds abstraction, around which the danger of global thinking revolves. Those with grand abstract schemes to ‘save the world’ don’t always think that differently from those with grand abstract schemes to ‘take over the world.’ Both must operate on reductionist assumptions and the myth of the White Man’s Burden. Indeed, the most successful global thinkers have been imperial governments and multinational corporations (Berry, 1993, p. 19). This is in no way a call for withdrawal; on the contrary, isolation can be just as dangerous and justice necessitates imaginative conversation and respectful generosity for the plurality of the world’s local places (ibid, p. 50). No place is wholly free while another is enslaved, no place wholly healed while another is diseased. However, I do have questions as to whether massive ‘global solutions’ to ‘global problems’ will be any less destructive than the problems which they seek to solve. Contrary to popular belief, I think size does matter. <br /><br />I am not haunted and convicted by the land between the river and the sea because of the “Israel-Palestine conflict,” which is such an overwhelmingly abstract concept. We certainly need our helpful heuristic devices, but they often morph into meta-narratives that gloss over, or erase, complexities and particularities. So I do not go because of “the Conflict.” I am convicted because of names, faces, stories, and places. And, increasingly, I am convicted of names, faces, stories, and places in my own homeland. Americans sometimes travel far away from home to realize that their neighbors are suffering too. I think it may be easier for Americans to romantically care about the effects of global inequity (starving kids on the other side of the world) than to care about the affects of that inequity (‘free’ economic forces and systems based on what Dr. King called the giant triplets of racism, militarism, and materialism). Those questions are too hard to ask because the answers expose our complicity in those causes. We can’t just withdraw and pretend like systems and structures don’t need to be changed.<br /><br />I think critiques of the withdrawal of the ‘quiet in the land’ have been valid, but I worry that for the sake of validity peacebuilders have sacrificed vitality. Lederach hints at the need for an image or vision of the future toward which we are building (ibid, p. 76-7), but in my mind this deserves much more attention. We need communities that microcosmically cultivate a restorative culture, prophetically imagining what the alternative future looks like right now. These visions must be practiced in a rooted community, like MGK, the Amish, Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salaam, a Gandhian ashram, Buddhist sanghas, or Christian monastic movements (old and new). I think we should advocate for a kind of withdrawal: defection from oppressive systems and practices in order to inhabit something better. All addicts need rehabilitation, and rehabilitation requires limitations, accountability, and commitment. But I must constantly recognize that my ability to defect is in many ways due to my privilege within the very system from which I am withdrawing, which therefore means I must also work to carve out alternatives for others and help dismantle unjust structures. <br /><br />Because of this, I am admittedly biased toward the grassroots and middle-range sectors (Lederach, 1997, p. 39). I do think policies need to be changed, but I think most changes in policies have been the result of community organizing and movements by the most disenfranchised, whether it be civil rights, unemployment benefits, health and safety standards, food and drug regulations, fair housing statutes, etc (Myers, 1994, p. 218). Gandhi didn’t achieve relevancy by moving to the capitol and attempting to reform the Metonyms on their terms. He had an influential voice with the Powers that Be, but he also lived out his future vision in the present in the marginal places of the world. Proximity matters: where I live, who I live there with, and how I live there define my relationship to the world. Aside from water and shit, not much of anything ever trickles down (Lederach, 1997, p. 45), especially ‘reagonomically’: the pipes always seem to get clogged, or just re-routed. The top-level seems like a vacuum into which good-hearted people can get sucked because they believe they can change something that has such overpowering centripetal force. This is what empire does: colonize the good intentions of the noble who desire to force the flow in a centrifugal direction. I am honestly cynical that this works, because the top-level can colonize people who didn’t work in that sector (and therefore weren’t even on the payroll). Martin Luther King is a sentimental bobble-head on a broken record player: “I have a dream! I have a dream! I have a dream!” Thank goodness! We never have to hear what that dream actually entailed, especially the dreams he had and planned to proclaim right before he got shot in the head. Jesus of Nazareth is muzzled as the meek and mild Savior and the privatized poster child for the empire that executed him as a political dissident. We piously say that if we had lived in the time of our ancestors we would never have killed the prophets. Instead, we would just automate them by replaying decontextualized (and depoliticized) sound bites and giving them annual national holidays. Can David ever defeat Goliath on the giant’s terms? <br /><br />Lederach relates the excellent societal metaphor of a House (ibid, pp. xv, 37). He notes opposing theories about how to approach this House (ibid, p. 37), but he seems to think that all levels and approaches have legitimacy (ibid, p. 60). Surely they are interrelated, but are they equally legitimate? This is an honest question, not a loaded one, one that constantly disturbs my settled answers. I am not suggesting that we can ignore the power of the top-level and how it relates to the middle-range and grassroots sectors. After all, the top-level can build a wall through my olive groves whether I acknowledge it or not. He may indeed be right, but I think there is a difference between acknowledging its existence and accepting it. The blueprints of our House called for liberty and justice for all, but the actual foundation was built on white supremacy, patriarchy, and oligarchy (Myers, 1994, p. 203). This House in which we live was built more by enslaved Africans than by free Europeans, and we evicted the previous inhabitants whose House (or should I say, House<em>s</em>), while more structurally simple, was far more sound and secure (perhaps because it was simple). The opposing theories mentioned by Lederach seem to me to lie at the heart of the matter. One approach believes social injustices are a personal and policy problem: the House needs some slight adjustments and some redecorating, but it’s structurally fine. The other approach thinks that these injustices stem from the very history and formations of economic and political structures themselves: the House cannot simply be repainted, but might be in need of extensive renovation. <br /><br />Because a House divided against itself cannot stand.<br /><br /><br /><br />References<br /><br />Berry, W. (1993). Sex, economy, freedom, and community: Eight essays. New York City: <br />Pantheon Books<br /><br />Dillon, J. (Producer, Screenwriter/Director). (2008). Call+Response [Motion Picture]. United States: Fair Trade Pictures.<br /><br />Lederach, J. (1997). Building peace: Sustainable reconciliation in divided societies. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Institute of Peace<br /><br />Myers. C. (1994). Who will roll away the stone?: Discipleship queries for first world christians. Maryknoll: Orbis Books.Jonathan McRayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11320785725421810116noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2118802837677828648.post-22655447799473044972011-03-13T15:09:00.000-05:002011-03-13T15:10:13.561-05:00Interrogation Part IIII slunk into the chair next to Patrick and Paul, who turned to me expectantly but without speaking.<br /><br />“Well,” I started in answer to their gaze, “on the bright side, looks like we might go back to Porto Rafti today.”<br /><br />I barely had time to explain before I was called back in again. The pregnant woman still sat with fingers interlaced, but standing beside her was the first official who questioned us. Her arms were crossed and she watched me until I sat down. Suddenly she flew forward and slammed the door.<br /><br />“You lied to me!” she yelled as she returned to the other side of the table. “You are a liar!”<br /><br />I immediately started sweating. This was now going much worse than I anticipated. I took a deep breath to regain my composure.<br /><br />“I’m sorry you feel that way, but I didn’t lie.” <br /><br />“You did not tell me you were volunteering,” she retorted.<br /><br />I countered, “You didn’t ask me if I was volunteering.”<br /><br />Her jaw tightened and she slammed her fist on the table.<br /><br />“You are a liar!” she cried and pointed her finger at me. “If you lie, you think you can get in to Israel? I am the authority and I get to decide to let you back in or not! If you want to get in to Israel you need to tell the truth!” <br /><br />I assured her that I meant to do so. So the interrogation began.<br /><br />“You did not tell me you have been volunteering,” she repeated. “Where have you been working?”<br /><br />I said I wrote and edited with an NGO in Jerusalem.<br /><br />“Where else?”<br /><br />Her tone seemed confident enough that I decided not to test her knowledge of my life.<br /><br />“I have also worked with a center for youth and adults with developmental disabilities near Bethlehem.”<br /><br />The woman from immigration now spoke: “You have to have a volunteer visa for this.”<br /><br />This was news to me, and I told her so. <br /><br />“You can’t do what you’re doing,” she persisted. “You can’t have a three-month visa and then leave and then come back and get another three-month visa.”<br /><br />“Since when?” I answered with a furrowed brow. I was willing to concede that the policy may exist somewhere in fine print but it certainly wasn’t regularly enforced. “Everybody does this. When people leave to go to Jordan and come back, you just give them another three months. I’ve seen this.” <br /><br />She seemed to ignore me.<br /><br />“You’re only allowed one three-month visa per year.”<br /><br />“Since when?” I said again. “I was here last March and then came back in September and then got another visa in November.”<br /><br />“It’s always been this way.”<br /><br />I pressed the issue and said, “Is there somewhere where I could read about this?” <br /><br />She looked up in the air and shrugged. <br />“Uh, Ministry of Tourism, maybe.”<br /><br />The first woman turned to face the wall behind her and continued her line of questioning.<br />“You did not tell me you have been to Hebron.”<br /><br />“Well, I haven’t.”<br /><br />She spun around with fierce alacrity.<br />“I’ve read your blog. You’ve been to Hebron.”<br /><br />I remembered a story I wrote about an excursion to Hebron during the summer I worked as a journalist.<br /><br />“But that was a year ago,” I objected. “You didn’t ask me where I went a year ago, you asked where I went on this trip.”<br /><br />“That is a lie!” she maintained.<br /><br />“I’m sorry you feel that way,” I said, and I think I said it sincerely.<br /><br />She placed both palms on the edge of the table and leaned forward until she was halfway across to me. I leaned back as much as I could.<br /><br />“I have every reason now to deport you,” she said. “If I do, you will be banned from reentry for ten years.”<br /><br />I looked from face to face and wondered why Patrick and Paul hadn’t been invited to share in this experience with me. <br /><br />“Tell me why I should let you back in to Israel,” she said, pacing beside my chair.<br /><br />My mouth hung open as I scrambled for compelling reasons. I said the first thing that came to mind. <br /><br />“Well, we, we help the economy, I mean, we’re, we’re buying things here.” <br />I bit my tongue, surprised that I used capitalism as an excuse for a visa. She almost laughed. <br /><br />“A lot of people help the economy. You’re not that special. Give me another reason!”<br /><br />“Umm, my dad is coming to do medical lectures at Ben Gurion University in a week, and so we are hoping to meet up with him.”<br /><br />She clicked her tongue against the back of her teeth, unimpressed.<br />“That’s not good enough, give me another reason.”<br /><br />I thought for a moment and said, “It’s going to cost a lot of money for us to change our flights from April to now and we don’t have much money.” <br /><br />“I don’t care how much money it costs you,” she shrugged. “These are not good reasons.”<br /><br />“I’m sorry,” I said, raising my hands in exasperation, “but you asked me to give you reasons, and I’m just trying to give you the reasons that you asked for.”<br /><br />“How long have we been holding you now?” she asked, standing behind the woman from immigration who still sat with her stocky arms on the table.<br /><br />“Three-and-a-half hours?” I guessed. <br /><br />She smirked. “Well, it’s been a lot longer than that, and I don’t mind keeping you all night until you start talking.” <br /><br />“I’m trying to answer the questions that you’re asking me!” I exclaimed.<br /><br />“If you had told me the truth three-and-a-half hours ago, you would have had no problems and gotten out.”<br /><br />She tried to continue but I interrupted.<br /><br />“Wait, wait a minute,” I said confused. “You’re saying that if I had told you we had volunteered with Palestinians in the West Bank, you would have let us through, immediately, without any questions?”<br /><br />Both of them looked at me and said, “Yes, of course.”<br /><br />I laughed and said “Really?” I wanted to say, “How come I can’t lie, but you can lie?” I resisted that temptation.<br /><br />The official pointed at the door and ordered, “Get out. Go wait outside.”<br /><br />Patrick said they could hear her yelling at me, catching words like <em>liar</em>, <em>deportation</em>, <em>ten years</em>. He also said he was glad it was me and not him. Then, for the last time, I was called back in to the office. Only the pregnant woman from immigration sat there. She sat very still and spoke calmly. <br /><br />“Even though you lied to us, and even though you have not told us what we have asked for at every turn, we will give each of you a one-month visa.” <br /><br />“Is there any way that we could get two months?” I requested slowly and softly for fear of treading on thin ice. “Our flight is April 23rd and that’s all we want.”<br /><br />“No, I can’t! I should actually deport you now because you lied, and you’ll be banned for ten years.”<br /><br />“Well,” I gulped, “I guess we’ll take the one month.”<br /><br /><br />After four-and-a-half-hours we walked outside to a cool night, one I barely noticed. I numbly climbed into a transport van just outside the terminal. All I wanted was to sit by a fire in the house on the hill. Thinking could wait until later. I let my head smack against the window. The sun had already gone down across the Mediterranean and we drove to Jerusalem in darkness.Jonathan McRayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11320785725421810116noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2118802837677828648.post-63309321616848340092011-03-13T15:07:00.000-05:002011-03-13T15:09:00.124-05:00Interrogation Part II“Please wait here,” she said, pointing to a row of chairs in a secluded back-corner room. “I’ll call you individually.”<br /><br />We slumped down in our chairs, bags smacking the floor, blank expressions staring across at a blank wall. All I could think to say was “Shit.”<br /><br />“We’re gonna have to pay a bunch of money to change our flights and we won’t see our stuff again,” Paul mumbled. He leaned his head back and chuckled. “Maybe they’ll at least send us back to Greece.”<br /><br />Patrick thrust his legs out in front of him and said, “Not gonna lie, but when I saw you come around the corner with a security guard I definitely thought about running. They already gave me my three-month visa!”<br /><br />Over the next hour, we were each escorted into a small office where the security official sat behind a large desk. Patrick went first, then me, and Paul last. All of us heard similar questions: why we went to Greece, where we were from, what our parents’ birthdates are. The woman rarely looked at me, typing quickly and facing a wide computer monitor turned so far away from me that she almost had to lean to see it herself. Her ponytailed hair was curly like confetti and she wore an unmarked windbreaker. I glanced at several maps near my head as she drummed the keyboard. She was fairly friendly for the time being, laughing that I actually knew my parents’ birthdates (which made it seem stranger that she even asked) and commenting that I must like Israel a lot considering all the stamps in my passport. I smiled. <br /><br />“So,” she said, still typing even though I hadn’t said anything in several minutes, “what have you done in Israel?”<br /><br />While we sat dejected in the corner waiting area, the three of us reviewed our responses. We had discussed them before, most recently a week earlier as we prepared to fly to Greece, but we passed through security faster than I’ve ever seen. Palestinian and Israeli friends had cautioned me not to share too much of what I do in the West Bank. But I have no desire to lie because I have no desire to make things easier for myself by editing out the existence of my Palestinian friends. Instead, I try to answer questions honestly as they’re asked. If it wasn’t specifically asked, it doesn’t need to be specifically answered. <br /><br />“Well, we’ve done some backpacking and tourism,” I responded, which was true. We backpacked around the Galilee and I to different cities for interviews and we frequented sites designated as tourist attractions. “I have family friends here and we’ve visited them as well.”<br /><br />She asked Patrick a more pointed question: “Where have you been in the West Bank?”<br /><br />He thought for a moment before saying, “Ah, we’ve been to Bethlehem, we hiked the Wadi Qelt so we ended up in Jericho, and we went to Ramallah for a day . . .”<br /><br />She quickly interrupted.<br />“Where else? Have you been to Nablus? Have you been to Qalqiliya? Jenin? Tulkarem? Have you been to Hebron?”<br /><br />Patrick narrowed his eyes and pensively sucked his teeth.<br />“Shepherd’s Field?” he ventured. <br /><br />Singing angels, immaculate conceptions, and incense-flooded caves outside of Bethlehem didn’t seem to interest her so she sent him back outside to wait. <br /><br />After the interviews, wait we did. I called my dad several times, discussing possible answers or contingency plans if things went sour. After nearly an hour-and-a-half, a very stern and very pregnant woman walked into the room. She held photocopies of our passports and looked at each one of us in turn. <br /><br />“Please, come with me,” she said in abrupt syllabic punctuations. <br /><br />She led us to the other side of the passport control area where we once again sat down in another enclave, partitioned into a waiting room and two adjacent offices. I was called into the office momentarily. I stood and took a deep breath, Patrick gave me a thumbs-up, and Paul stared at the ceiling. I sat down in the cold undecorated room across from the pregnant woman who embedded her thick elbows into the table’s surface. She flipped through stapled papers in front of her. <br /><br />Then she set them aside and said, “I’m from immigration. We need to talk.”<br /><br />She repeated many of the questions asked by the first lady, but very quickly her subtly faded away. <br /><br />“Have you been volunteering?”<br /><br />I faltered, caught off guard by her directness.<br />“Well, we’ve backpacked, we’ve been tourists.”<br /><br />“Have you been volunteering?” she repeated with severe precision.<br /><br />I cleared my throat and said, “Well, I’ve written some for an organization based in Jerusalem.”<br /><br />“Who do you know here?”<br /><br />I listed off a few names, Israeli names of family friends and coworkers. When I did the same at the Israel-Jordan border and mentioned that my grandfather had worked on excavation sites and taught in Jerusalem, we were quickly granted three-month visas and sent on our way. This woman from immigration took, at least in my experience, the road less traveled.<br /><br />“Give me their phone numbers. I’m going to call them.”<br /><br />The number I pressed dialed Musalaha’s administrator. She answered evasively, confirming that I had written some for them but appropriately fibbing that she didn’t know me well enough to answer more questions. The woman from immigration was unsatisfied. She slid the phone back across the table and wiped her forehead. The room was too quiet and too empty so the quietness filled it until it mutated into eeriness. Finally, she interlaced her thick fingers, her neck lowering beneath her broad shoulders, and she looked squarely at me again. <br /><br />“We know what you are doing,” she declared dramatically. “We googled you.”<br /><br />I googled myself later. The first hit was a link to articles I wrote about visiting Palestinian cities and the devastating effect of the occupation. The second hit was the blog I kept while living in Ramallah. The blog had links to stories I wrote for the Palestine Monitor. <br /><br />“So we know. Wait outside.”Jonathan McRayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11320785725421810116noreply@blogger.com0