Communication and Nonviolence

Gerald J. Biesecker-Mast

Presentation at The Unitarian Fellowship of Lima,

January 24, 1999

Thanks for inviting me to speak with you about a subject that I believe is critical to our survival as human beings in the 21^st century. By survival I don’t simply mean our physical presence on the earth as a species, although that may certainly be in question. Rather, by survival I mean our ability to conceive of each other as human and therefore worthy of mutual respect and dignity.

There are two trajectories of thought and concern to which I will refer throughout my time with you. The first is the commitment to radical love and generosity articulated at the origin of the Christian tradition by Jesus of Nazareth and applied to the difficult struggles for justice and peace in our century by such leaders as Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Benigno Aquino, and Nelson Mandela. My own denomination, the Mennonite church, has shared with numerous other religious groups including Quakers and Unitarians the distinction of making this commitment to peace a central feature of our fellowships. For those of us who take seriously the teachings of Jesus, this commitment to peace, as I understand it, is not a mere endorsement of peaceful relationships among human beings when possible. Rather, this commitment insists on recognizing and calling forth the humanity of the enemy, even when that enemy threatens our lives and well-being. “You have heard it that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,’” Jesus notes in the gospel according to Matthew. “But I say to you, do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; and if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well.” Walter Wink has properly noted that these commands don’t simply imply a passive acceptance of violence, but instead suggest a much more subversive form of nonviolent resistance. In the cultural context to which Jesus spoke, turning the other cheek would have required the striker to hit the victim with the palm of his hand, thus expressing an intimacy with the victim that would have revolted the abuser. Similarly, removing one’s cloak in the context of a lawsuit would have exposed the victim’s body, thus shaming the one bringing the suit. In any event, what is clear from these difficult texts is that we are called to a relationship with the other that exceeds the law of revenge and reciprocity and is instead characterized by creativity and generosity.

The second trajectory of thought to which I will refer this morning is the discipline of human communication which is a common heritage for all of us who live within the traditions and institutions of democracy conceived in ancient Athens and developed during the Enlightenment. By this I don’t simply mean the human ability to share symbolic meaning, which surely seems to be a universal characteristic of humans. Rather I speak of the arts of rhetoric, which are concerned with the ability of human beings to engage in mutual transformation through rhetorical exchange, to make wise choices through collective deliberation, and to challenge social wrongs through the force of persuasion.

For those of us who are committed to nonviolence the practice of such communication is the means whereby we seek to transform the world. Our desire for justice is qualified by our refusal to use violence to achieve it. Thus, when we struggle against the evils that still plague our world – war, poverty, prejudice, pollution, and genocide – the primary strategy must be one of persuasion, not persecution; of communication, not coercion.

But even if we are thus committed to peace and persuasion, to the agency of the word rather than the violence of the sword, we are still left with a troubling question. Can we do violence with words as well as with deeds? Can our refusal to take up the sword guarantee that we will not do great harm to another?

An old childhood rhyme suggests that our words are in fact harmless. As children, many of us heard the reassuring little rhyme from our parents: sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me. I dare say, some of us still repeat these words to ourselves on bad days when we feel hurt by the words of others. Yet, in our everyday conversations we often give evidence that we doubt the truth of this rhyme.

On internet chat groups, for example, one often finds people complaining that they have been deeply hurt, offended, or harmed by the words they find on their computer screen. In one discussion list of which I am a part, for example, I came across the following expressions of vulnerability to the violence of words. "I think I've said enough of the wrong thing here …to have my head taken off, so I think I'd better stop," wrote one participant. "To those who read my answers and disagree, don't let your prejudices lead you to throwing stones until you understand the answers," pleaded a different writer. "And now I have made myself vulnerable again," sighed another surfer after bravely critiquing someone else's post. "I never learn."

Like these discussants on an electronic forum, we often use metaphors of violence to describe our experiences of conversation and communication. When someone else criticizes our viewpoint, we sometimes say that we have been attacked. On internet chat groups, after an avalanche of challenges to our viewpoint, we say that we have been flamed. Some words, we say, cut us to the bone. Such common-sense expressions and many others suggest that we accept at an intuitive level that the childhood rhyme about sticks and stones is not true, that our words have great capacity for harm as well as good. We are more convinced, I think, by the biblical claims in the letter of James: "How great a forest is set ablaze by a small fire! And the tongue is a fire. The tongue is placed among our members as a world of iniquity; it stains the whole body, sets on fire the cycle of nature, and is itself set on fire by hell With it we bless the Lord and Father, and with it we curse those who are made in the likeness of God" (3:5-9).

What does it mean that our words have the capacity to curse those who are made in the likeness of God? In what ways do we curse each other today? What are the effects of such curses on human beings and on human societies? Can violence in language be equated to violence with deeds? How do we resist violent language without resorting ourselves to violent language? These are some questions for which I wish to suggest some provisional answers this morning. These suggestions are made against two important backdrops that need some description: the cultural battlefield of North America and the theoretical terrain of postmodern social theory.

James Davison Hunter, in a recent book entitled Culture Wars, has described quite compellingly how the American social landscape has become divided against itself during the latter part of the twentieth century. According to Hunter, the old divides between Catholic and Protestant, Jew and Christian, North and South have been superseded by a new rift in cultural identity that cuts right through most religious and social institutions, rather than between them. This rift divides Americans who see themselves as committed to traditional values from those who understand themselves as progressives. It separates those who believe that truth never changes from those who assume it is shaped by cultural context and historical moment. Two of the most visible social issues at the heart of this divide are the right of women to an abortion and the legitimacy of gay and lesbian unions. But according to Hunter these issues are only surface manifestations of more fundamental differences in understanding about God, morality, and human history that have deepened and often resulted in violence during the past three decades. People march against abortion clinics and curse their gay and lesbian neighbors because they believe they are on God’s side and because they believe that the course of history is at stake.

Recent victims of this culture war include Matthew Shephard, who was beaten to death because he was gay and Barnett Slepian who was shot down because he was an abortion provider. Arguably, those who were killed in the Oklahoma City bombing were victims of this culture war, as were, in a less direct way, the members of the Branch Davidian sect near Waco who died in that awful fire a year before the bomb in Oklahoma City exploded. The connection between the culture war described by Hunter and the many acts of physical violence associated with that war is fairly obvious to many of us. In these and innumerable other tragic cases, the curse against the neighbor has led to the murder of the neighbor.

Less obvious, perhaps, is a feature of contemporary American society that linguist Deborah Tannen calls the Argument Culture. According to Tannen, American political and popular culture at the end of the twentieth century is saturated by an adversarial approach to solving problems and producing entertainment. From the talk shows to the Congress, our public discourse has been shaped by the ethos of war, of battle, of antagonism. Consequently, Tannen writes, Americans have become better at having an argument than making an argument. Unfortunately for us, this approach to public discussion has meant that we come to base our own verbal success in the failure of our presumed opponents. In order for me to win, someone has to lose. As this adversarial ethos infects all of our communication practices our everyday human relationships – with our colleagues, with our spouses and partners, with our children and parents, and with our neighbors of all kinds – are shaped increasingly by antagonism rather than by cooperation, by conflict rather than by commitment. In short, our own sense of well-being comes to depend on the triumph of the self over the other. Those who curse each other on the Jerry Springer show may not be contributing to murder, but, if Tannen is right, then they are doing real damage to one another’s humanity and to the humanity of the audience.

My study of recent social theory suggests that the linguistic antagonism described by Tannen is more profound than she assumes. That is, our tendency to negate the other in our communication with her may very well be grounded in the very grammar of language itself. Ferdinand de Saussure for example argued that language has meaning for us not because it simply refers to something outside itself but rather because it is structured around what he called binary oppositions that make meaning of any kind possible. To understand this view, consider the following example.

As I walk to class at Bluffton College, I often stop to watch a family of ducks playing in Riley Creek which flows through the campus. There is no doubt that the entities we call ducks have an existence independent of my consciousness. Yet, they appear to me as a meaningful spectacle only insofar as they are distinguished through a sign system as animals, instead of, say, plants; as ducks versus, for example, dogs. One of the pleasures in watching these ducks more recently is that at least one cluster appears to me as what I would call a family: two differently colored ducks appear to be male and female and the smaller size ducks capering about seem to be the children. As I watch the ducks I intuitively strive to give meaning to their actions by trying to distinguish, for example, this family from the other ducks that are wandering about that do not appear to be part of a family. At a common-sensical register, the way that I am thinking about these ducks appears to be a natural outcome of the fact that the ducks are there doing their thing. Yet what Saussure's structural linguistics teaches us is that in fact my experience of these entitities as animals, as ducks, and as a family, was made possible through the very human practice of signification that has nothing really to do with the ducks themselves. Specifically, I was able to make meaning of this spectacle because of all the possible terms available to me that were not applicable: not grass, not trees, not buildings, not dogs, not cats, not zebras, etc. Furthermore, in making this meaning, at each moment I privileged one term of a binary opposition over the other: i.e. duck/not duck. Notice that the system of binary oppositions forces me to give presence to one sign at the expense of the others. To the extent that I'm noticing the duck, this is possible because I'm capable of noticing that it is not any of the other things that it might be. This doesn't seem to be a big deal when we're talking about the "duck/not duck" binary but it is has far more implications when we think about the "family/not family" binary. In our society, we have learned that family is Mom, Pop, and the kids. That which doesn't fit this is usually categorized as "not family" just as I categorized those ducks that didn't seem to fit into this family scheme. So, to the extent that I was focusing on the family aspect of these ducks, the ducks that seemed to fit into a family were privileged in my consciousness whereas the other ducks were forced into the underprivileged category of not family. At that moment in which I was thinking "Oh, what a cute little family of ducks," I could not account for the ducks that didn't fit into family except to think of them as not belonging, as not part of the family, as not even having a family. They simply didn't figure except insofar as they were available examples of what the family is not. Notice that meaning-making as interpreted by structuralists like Saussure intrinsically forces us to make these kinds of exclusions. In order to notice anything; that is, to give anything meaning, we privilege one term over the other possibilities which then appear as the negatives of the privileged term. While binary oppositions are intrinsic to meaning-making and thus necessary to making it through the day; they also make much trouble for us when they function in ways that underwrite prejudice and oppression. An example of the latter is the cultural attribution of presence to whiteness and absence to blackness. Thus, in our society, the races have been divided into white and non-white in the average American's sign system. The many variations of skin color in our society are thus forced into a racial binary opposition that privileges whiteness as the norm against which all the other skin colors are rendered as non-white. Such an everyday binary opposition unfortunately insures that most Americans get through the day as racists of one kind or another, whether they mean to or not. The disturbing implication of this view of language is that the violence we seek to avoid may actually be built into the very cultural grammars of our speech.

Indeed recent psychoanalytic theory suggests that this violence is constitutive of our very sense of self; that is, we spend our lives struggling to construct a self that is nevertheless always symbolically subverted by the presence of the other within the symbolic world we inhabit. According to Renata Salecl, for example, hate crimes can best be understood as symbolic efforts to prop up the unstable identity of the perpetrator. In fact, these crimes are only the worst instances of the more typical kinds of communication behaviors we engage in everyday which strengthen our own identity at the expense of the other. Obviously, when we tell racist and sexist jokes we are engaging in such self assurance, but other, more publicly acceptable behaviors perform the same function: cheering for a sports team, poking fun at our spouse, attributing bad motives to a successful colleague, and watching another bomb hit an Iraqi bunker on television.

If indeed contemporary social and linguistic theorists are correct that the maintenance of the self tends to come at the expense of the other, then the meaning of nonviolence would seem to expand far beyond the refusal to do physical harm. In fact, such an understanding gives new meaning to the words of Jesus that call us to lose the self in order to find it, which urge us not to worry about tomorrow, and which suggest the centrality of the cross. Is it possible to communicate nonviolently in the everyday hustle and bustle of life, to speak to the other in a way that avoids demeaning her? I believe it is, but I think the social theory I’ve summarized suggests it is much harder than we may have previously thought.

What would be the characteristics of a such a nonviolent practice of communication? I offer three possible characteristic communication habits that I believe can contribute to the maintenance and restoration of properly human relationships, and that can sustain movements for social transformation without resorting to either physical or verbal violence.

Justice

Within the biblical tradition, there is a consistent commitment to justice that is characterized by the overturning of the status quo, by the radical transformation of systems and structures and hierarchies that oppress people and dehumanize them. Familiar words from the prophet Isaiah anticipate the day when valleys will be exalted, mountains brought low, crooked places straight, and rough places plane. Mary in her Magnificat follows that tradition. In her speech of praise and prophecy the proud are scattered, the powerful are brought down from their thrones, the lowly are lifted up, the hungry are filled, and the rich are sent away empty. In the sayings of Jesus we find that the first shall be last, the last first, and the servants served by their masters. We might reframe this logic of justice within the terms of contemporary social theory to say that every binary opposition will be reversed, and every excluded term will be exalted, every privileged symbol marginalized.

I suggest that any commitment to nonviolent communication should always take place within the context of this struggle for justice. We should not be nonviolent on behalf of the status quo. Indeed, I suggest that when certain classes or groups of people are privileged within our social and political order at the expense of others, that those privileged groups ought to be challenged and critiqued and undermined by our communication practices in ways that it would never be right were we speaking of those who are already excluded or harmed by the status quo. Jesus, for example, was not hesitant to characterize the political and religious authorities of his time in fairly uncomplementary terms. He called Herod a fox and his religious opponents’ whited sepulchres. When it so happens that we are the privileged group under critique, the proper response is not resistance but nonresistance. The struggle for justice may very well mean that we are expected to give up that which seems crucial for our survival. In my view, it is the task of the church in North America to prepare those of us who are wealthy and the privileged to give up what we are hoarding, to extend ourselves to the outsiders, and to help us find ourselves, as the Shaker hymn puts it, in the place that’s right, and thus in the valley of love and delight.

Hope

In this struggle for justice we must avoid falling into the ethos of either cynicism or optimism. Public discourse today is saturated with a grim doubt about the motives of others that makes humane communication very difficult. On the other hand, a cheap optimism provides no constructive or effective antidote to such cynicism.

What I suggest is that we infuse our speech with hope and love toward the other, giving our audiences the benefit of the doubt, and offering generous interpretations of the others’ motives. As Bishop Desmond Tuto of South Africa said: “When you look at someone with eyes of love, you see a reality different from that of someone who looks at the same person without love, with hatred or even with just indifference.”

In any good public speaking class we learn that we must in our speech find ways to identify with the other, to adapt ourselves to the other’s perspectives. At the very least, we must not show contempt toward the other, if we seek to persuade her or to communicate with him. Such efforts to connect can be seen not only as efforts to change the other, but also as acts of hope for the future of a common humanity. I’m not suggesting here that we compromise our commitments, but rather that we infuse those commitments with hope, rather than cynicism or cheap optimism. I like very much Cornel West’s definition of hope: sustaining the tragic without giving in to the pathetic. In other words, our hope must be rooted in a clear-headed understanding of the very difficult dilemmas that constitute our humanity, including, for example, a recognition that the very structures of our consciousness are corrupted by the logic of exclusion. At the same time, we strive to speak in ways that affirm rather than destroy our humanity, even when we are speaking out against wrongdoing and injustice.

Humility

The understanding of language I’ve outlined earlier suggests that we are not entirely in control of our speech; that our efforts to communicate are already influenced by the prejudices inherent in symbolic action. Thus, it seems to me, that we must be careful not to insist that the meanings we associate with our speech are the only correct ones. That is, when someone tells us that we have harmed them in our speech, we must be prepared to acknowledge that harm and ask forgiveness, even if that harm was unwitting or unthinking.

Such a posture can best be described as humility, I think. One of the most familiar statements in the New Testament is that none of us should think more highly of ourselves than we ought to think. It is this temptation to arrogance in speech that Jesus was critiquing when he called on us to be cautious in judgment and to never call another person a fool. It is quite fitting is it not that the Beatitudes have the meek inheriting the earth? Would our world not be a more peaceful place if the ruling elites displayed more humility in their decisions and actions? Would our communication not contribute more to peace and harmony if we were a little less insistent that it is we who have been misunderstood and not the other.

In conclusion I want to read a passage from a sermon given by Martin Luther King in which he tells the story of the relationship between President Lincoln and Secretary Of State Stanton. It seems fitting during this time of national rancor that we recall a story of hope that took place at another moment of national crisis and civil strife:

We never get rid of an enemy by meeting hate with hate; we get rid of an enemy by getting rid of enmity. By its very nature, hate destroys and tears down; by its very nature, love creates and builds up. Love transforms with redemptive power. Lincoln tried love and left for all history a magnificent drama of reconciliation. When he was campaigning for the presidency one of his archenemies was a man named Stanton. For some reason Stanton hated Lincoln. He used every ounce of his energy to degrade him in the eyes of the public. So deep rooted was Stanton’s hate for Lincoln that he uttered unkind words about his physical appearance, and sought to embarrass him at every point with the bitterest diatribes. But in spite of this Lincoln was elected President of the United States. Then came the period when he had to select his cabinet which could consist of the persons who would be his most intimate associates in implementing his program. He started choosing men here and there for the various secretaryships. The day finally came for Lincoln to select a man to fill the all-important post of Secretary of War. Can you imagine whom Lincoln chose to fill this post? None other than the man named Stanton. There was an immediate uproar in the inner circle when the news began to spread. Adviser after advisor was heard saying, “Mr. President, you are making a mistake. Do you know this man Stanton? Are you familiar with all of the ugly things he said about you? He is your enemy. He will seek to sabotage your program. Have you thought this through, Mr. President?” Mr. Lincoln’s answer was terse and to the point: “Yes I know Mr. Stanton. I am aware of all the terrible things he has said about me. But after looking over the nation, I find that he is the best man for the job.” So Stanton became Abraham Lincoln’s Secretary of War and rendered an invaluable service to his nation and to his President. Not many years later Lincoln was assassinated. Many laudable things ere said about him. Even today millions of people still adore him as the greatest of all Americans. H. G. Wells selected him as one of the six great men of history. But of all of the great statements made about Abraham Lincoln, the words of Stanton remain among the greatest. Standing near the dead body of the man he once hated, Stanton referred to him as one of the greatest men that ever lived and said “he now belongs to the ages.” If Lincoln had hated Stanton both men would have gone to their graves as bitter enemies. But through the power of love Lincoln transformed an enemy into a friend. It was this same attitude that made it possible for Lincoln to speak a kind word about the South during the Civil War when feeling was most bitter. Asked by a shocked bystander how he could do this, Lincoln said, “Madam, do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?” This is the power of redemptive love.[1]

And that, my friends, is the power to transform others and ourselves that lies with the words we speak. May we be wise as serpents and gentle as doves. Thank you.