Q&A: G. Scott Brown
Interview: Kimberlyn David
Through his work, G. Scott Brown bridges divides: psychology and spirituality, the personal and the political, humanity and nature, peacemaking and activism. As a leading advocate for consistent nonviolence, he brings the principles and practices of restorative justice to bear on the full range of social issues. Scott is also a trained peacemaker, transformational life coach and author of Active Peace: A Mindful Path to a Nonviolent World.
How do you define peace? Perhaps the better question is: Why “active” peace rather than simply peace?
My emphasis is on practice — on taking the responsibility to practice cultivating more and more self-awareness and self-acceptance, to practice cultivating more and more depth and honesty in interpersonal relationships, to practice deepening the felt sense of participation and reciprocity with nature and to bring the health and resilience that comes with working those foundations into our work for social change. It’s all very active, very intentional. It’s a path, one that I know I’ll be engaging for the rest of my life.
In his forward, Andrew Harvey writes that your book is a “passionately engaged and pragmatic message from the trenches of a life devoted to service.” What key moments in your life led to the insights you share in Active Peace?
It started with doing my best as a professional activist with a bare minimum of tools, training and maturity. I know anger, self-righteousness and feeling like a victim quite intimately. My heart was in the right place, I just wasn’t very connected to either my heart or my head. I was operating with little self-awareness and my shadow loomed large. Those 15 years were followed by my own version of the “dark night of the soul,” which included burning out as an activist at the same time my marriage collapsed. I knew just enough at that point to know something needed to change, and my affinity for nonviolent action led me onto the peacemaker path. I now use my experiences as an unconscious activist to help inform a more restorative approach.
Restoration is one of your major themes, if not THE theme, whether you’re discussing interpersonal relationships, societal relationships or our human relationship with Earth. The word “restoration” typically refers to healing what has been broken or renewing what has been damaged. With active peace, what is being restored?
The bottom line for me is healing the belief in separateness — the belief that we as humans are separate from each other, from other species and the earth and from our spiritual essence. That belief is at the root of our collective crisis and much, if not all, of our personal suffering. Using the word restoration helps put our activism and our lives in a healing context, and that feels critical to me.
I can imagine some activists gulping at your suggestion of applying the restorative justice model to climate justice, particularly in the wake of oil spills and profit-driven moves to extract more fossil fuels. These activists might point to ExxonMobil covering up their own climate science for 30 years — data we as communities and countries could’ve used to reach shared agreements on climate protection. Could you speak to their concern/fury while also further explaining how restorative justice could work in a climate protection context?
I think we all share a desire for accountability; the question is how to best achieve it. Current approaches may result in punishment but they rarely bring about real accountability — and accountability, much more than punishment, is the game-changer that can result in different, more life-affirming ways of thinking and behaving. Restorative justice is designed for accountability and for repairing the harm in the best way possible.
The big picture benefit is that since restorative justice is grounded in respect, responsibility and prioritizing relationships it contributes to healing the belief in separateness. It challenges and changes belief systems and therefore has transformative power. We can’t expect to change systems without changing the underlying beliefs and assumptions. Outside criminal justice systems and school and family settings, we need to use our imaginations and creativity when thinking about how the principles and practices of restorative justice might be used to repair harm because they aren’t being used yet.
I use the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico as an example in the book. I ask the questions: What if a process grounded in respect, relationship and responsibility was created? What if just one person with a share of responsibility for the harm showed up to participate? What if, after hearing about how that person was treated with respect, another person came forward and took responsibility? All of a sudden we have momentum building toward a way of repairing harm, avoiding harm and changing systems that aligns with nonviolence. The changing systems part is key — we can’t say we’ve repaired the harm from something like an oil spill unless good faith efforts have been made to ensure it won’t happen again, and that means systems change.
Once restorative practices get a foothold outside the justice system, the results will speak for themselves, just as they do within the justice system. The key is respect that allows people to work together and communicate in real ways. We can still have our initial anger and outrage — this isn’t about censorship or being nice — it’s about repairing harm. I also have no illusion that addressing something like an oil spill with restorative justice would be easy, only that if we’re going to survive, I think this is the direction we’ll need to go in.
You’re currently on a US book tour. What sort of feedback and/or reactions are you receiving from communities about mindfulness and nonviolence?
To really take in my message that it is essential to transformational nonviolence feels like it’s been a stretch in every group I’ve spoken to. It’s easy to lose touch with just how active and engaged mindfulness needs to be if it’s going to amount to much. And also how important it is to personal health and resilience. It can helpful to remember that self-awareness is the basic building block of emotional intelligence and healthy relationships.
For many authors, writing is a process of discovery. As you were writing Active Peace, did you stumble across any surprising personal revelations or learn anything that helped you see nonviolence in a new light?
Absolutely! As I went deeper into training and practice, I connected more with the wisdom of my own body and a felt sense of interrelatedness and aliveness. That brought a lot of relaxation and trust that came as such a relief. I experienced just how core personal healing and resilience is to nonviolence — not as a concept but as felt experience. I suppose the revelation can be summed up as “Wow, this path really works,” and of course that’s pretty satisfying and keeps me going deeper. There’s hope for me yet!
Learn more about G. Scott Brown and his new book, Active Peace: A Mindful Path to a Nonviolent World: see his bio and read reviews by Carolyn Baker and Rivera Sun at www.4activepeace.com. Active Peace is available through Collins Foundation Press and at Amazon.
Kimberlyn David is Editor & Creative Director of Nonviolence magazine and Communications Director at the Metta Center for Nonviolence.
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