Edward Guinan — If We Listen Well

Edward Guinan’s excerpt entitled If We Listen Well is a good starting point for anyone even thinking about becoming a pacifist. He gets right to the point and breaks down the human condition and how we’re all connected into six stanzas: peace, violence, nonviolence, the times, the themes and people, and the spiritual.

In his introduction however, Guinan begins by explaining one of the most commonly denounced myths about pacifism — that peace is the absence of conflict. A lot of people have this fairy tale vision of peace of women and children running barefoot through fields of daisies and abundant smiles scattered from coast to coast, but that is because many people do not know what peace really is. If peace really meant the absence of conflict, you may as well move to another planet; you’ll have plenty of conflict-free days ahead of you.

The truth is that there are many definitions of peace, but the one I like most is the one offered by my peace studies teacher, Colman McCarthy, and that is that peace is the result of love, and if love were easy, we’d all be good at it.

The problem with this narrow way of thinking that so many of us engage in is that we have “directed our attention to the prevailing conflict of the moment, attempting to reduce the destructiveness of the event.” What Guinan is getting at here is that if we want peace, what’s appropriate is prevention before, not intervention after. Our current governmental model and system operates in intervention after — that is, an insufficient approach that deals with conflict in a “fragmented and isolated way.”

“We continue to deal in symptomatic terms as if war and destruction and violence are the extensions and natural outgrowths of malignant attitudes, values, relationships, and beliefs that we continue to embrace.”

The key word here is “symptomatic” because in so many global occurrences, we have adopted this method of blaming or attacking symptoms of violence, not causes of violence. We kill the products of violence (people) while blindly or hardly addressing the root of violence. People rarely ask why the criminal robbed the bank or what drove or motivated the murderer or politician to engage in such hateful, spiteful acts of violence. Instead, we merely accept that this is what we’ve come to — an illusion that there will always be bad people, whatever “bad” might mean, and that they need to be killed to ensure our safety.

Peace

Guinan calls on each and every one of us to become more empathetic people. Every action we make can inflict a unifying or a destructive force on those around us.

“You cannot improve a man through punishment, nor can you bring peace through war or brotherhood through brutalization.”

This quote above reflects the old saying, “the end does not justify the means.”

Like Guinan, I tend to shed the labels of “we’s” and “they’s” and other labels that were created to make it seem like we are on different teams when that is simply not true. There is only one team. Joan Baez once said, “The pacifist thinks there is only one tribe. Three billion members. They come first. We think killing any member of the family is a dumb idea.” We should start viewing death at the hands of another human being as the death of one of our brothers or sisters, and thus, a significant part of ourselves. I mean, can you imagine how much progress we’d make as a human race if every time someone in the middle east was killed, we’d view that casualty as our own brother or sister? But we don’t do that. We antagonize and demonize other groups of people to fit our self-centered agendas.

Violence

“Violence can be seen as destructive communication.”

Guinan’s definition of violence is broken up into five components: physical, verbal, symbolic, psychological, and spiritual. Each is a display of hostility and hatred.

Physical violence: personal attacks, war, violation of human autonomy and integrity

Verbal violence: demeaning shouts and humiliation

Symbolic violence: evoke fear and aggression

Psychological violence: denial of humanity, equality, and dignity/respect (legal, institutional, moral)

Spiritual violence: racism, inferiority, worthlessness — categorization

I also find it interesting how he lists hunger, poverty, powerlessness, and despair as tangible forms of violence along with privilege. Privilege, while it can certainly manifest itself systematically, may derive from mere bad luck as well. For instance, if you can stand up, you’re privileged because some people were born with a condition that prevents them from walking and normal functioning. In any event, I suppose Guinan’s point here is that it doesn’t matter where privilege comes from; it’s still a form of violence.

Why is it that our society has no problem discussing and shaming ghetto uprisings, student unrest, and street thievery, but has little regard for the millions of brothers and sisters dying daily across the seas? Thousands and thousands of people die daily in the middle east from conflicts and disease that could be prevented.

Violence can also be broken up into two separate kinds. There is violence committed by the underprivileged, by those who hold little hope of escape but aim to seek life as they are in bondage. Think about a slave breaking the chains in order to escape. The second type of violence comes from a place of power. It is violence that aims to maintain some level of “personal gain” through imposing “inhuman conditions.” Guinan calls this type of violence “white-collar violence” because it is often legislated and talked about in board rooms and courts. This kind of violence “pours surplus milk down the sewers, robs workers of their wages, maintains prisons of infamy, lies to children, discards the weak and old, and insists that some should half-live while others rape and ravage the earth.” It is this second kind of violence that we must actively eradicate if we truly do want to live in a more peaceful world. This kind of world would have people contributing based on their humanity, not by their class or superiority.

Nonviolence

Another pacifist myth that Guinan tackles and that I hear so, so frequently is that nonviolence can be equated to passivity.

“It is not the posture of removing oneself from conflict that marks the truly nonviolent man, but, quite on the contrary, it is placing oneself at the heart of that dynamic.”

In a 1994 interview, Colman McCarthy offered an insightful clarification:

“Most in the media become very skeptical when they hear about pacifism. They equate it with just letting people walk all over you, which it clearly is not. When you study Gandhi, King, Merton, Day, Muste and all the others, you find that it’s direct resistance to authority, a direct resistance to Caesar. But it’s a very difficult subject to comprehend.”

Pacifism doesn’t mean a world without problems; it means that when there is a problem, you have a choice to settle it violently or nonviolently — no third option — and the nonviolent option results in less destruction.

Nonviolence, in other words, is our tool for fostering unity and brotherhood. It is the dynamic and force that binds us together, as evidence by countless large-scale peaceful movements as well as personal day-to-day interactions. Nonviolence stands with principles and expressions that garner human solidarity and against actions and attitudes that belittle, divide, and harm.

Nonviolence is our universal recipe for seeking truth in the world and love in our hearts. And when that truly does happen, we’ll have peace.

“Nonviolence cannot be separated from peace, for it is the value system and dynamic that makes peace possible.”

The Times

Another aspect of this excerpt I like so much is Guinan’s mentioning of how the only moment that matters is this one — reminiscent of mindfulness and inner peace. You’ve heard it before: you can’t change the past. But you can affect the future through your actions in the present. We can become self-absorbed in our excesses, blind to the pain and suffering of those far or even near. Or, we can realize how fortunate we are to be here right now, take advantage of each moment, which is our only option by the way, and open our eyes to pain and suffering.

“Love can, and must, be lived today, despite the pain and difficulty of such life. Tomorrow will carry the tenderness and peace which we live now. Do not compromise today.”

People have paid the price for engaging in peacemaking. Some have even died. Let’s not continue thinking or hoping that the new generation will solve anything. That defeats the purpose of the only thing we have — this moment.

The Themes and People

Though a duel-topic stanza, this portion of the excerpt is the shortest. Essentially, the takeaway here is this: one of the earliest signs of violence is taking form in some inability to communicate.

“Words lose their meaning and become hollow. They are twisted and deformed as tools of manipulation and servitude…peace becomes another name for multiheaded war missiles, and nonviolence is wrenched to mean silence.”

The Spiritual

The words start becoming a little more abstract in this section. We tend to frame our value as people in terms of loneliness rather than solace. We focus on all the questions we have and all the answers that escape us. Guinan also harps on the fact that the time we feel most lonely, isolated, and without answers is at night.

However, throughout every blemish, insecurity, or problem we’re faced with, there are moments of grace.

“There are imprints of heroic men and women, there are weavings of beauty, there are caresses of God.”

No matter how dark things might seem, there is love around the corner — a saving grace for our pain. Every one of us has a purpose that we can discover with some hard work and fun along the way. At least, that’s what I believe Guinan trying to explain.

Let’s acknowledge more of those moments that make us feel good inside. We will start feeling a lot more grateful during our quests for peace.

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