New Clear Vision

Humanity’s Future Hangs by the Delicate Threads of Our Resistance

by Winslow Myers

“Every man, woman, and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident, or miscalculation, or by madness. The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us.” — John F. Kennedy, U.N. Speech, 1961

In 1984, when I started volunteering for the organization Beyond War, it was not so difficult to gather an audience in a living room and have a dialogue about the obsolescence of war.

The horror of the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 had not yet faded. Short-range tactical nuclear weapons were proliferating on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Most citizens were willing to entertain the notion that not only could we not win a full-scale nuclear war, but there were three lesser levels of war that we had to prevent: even a limited nuclear war could bring on “nuclear winter.” A conventional war could bring in the nuclear powers. Even small “local” conflicts could escalate into general conventional war and then upward to the nuclear level. War, all war, was a potential extinction machine. It still is. (more…)

Sowing the Seeds of Planetary Nonviolence

by Winslow Myers

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.” — Rumi, circa 1250 A.D.

Keeping the biggest possible picture in mind, paradoxically, may give us the best lens through which to focus clearly upon the messy details of our lives at every level — internationally, nationally, locally, even personally.

How big a picture? Try: the whole earth and everything and everyone on it, through hundreds of millions of years of time.

What can this abstract immensity have to do with our own lives? More than we think, because we really are a product of the changes the earth has undergone over eons and we are totally subject to the rules that dictated those changes. By rules we mean big processes, ones we are still trying to fully understand. Processes like evolution itself. (more…)

Revenge Is Self-Defeating, and War Brings Terror

by Winslow Myers

Our euphoric national mood in the wake of the assassination of Osama bin Laden may make for a reluctance to look once again, or perhaps for the first time, at his demands. There has been almost nothing in the mainstream press that examines his motivations for terrorism.

We prefer a bogeyman of pure evil, because this does not require the kind of introspection suggested by the Society of Friends: what is it in my own inner condition, or that of my country, that might play a part in leading to a phenomenon like bin Laden?

In an extensive 2002 letter to the American people printed in the British publication the Observer, bin Laden laid out his specific justifications for horrific violence against innocents.

He began by citing passages from the Koran that give permission to Islamists to fight “disbelievers.” Immediately this sets up a pathological context, because it contains what philosophers call a performative contradiction: he proclaims Islam as a universal religion, but his vision is radically exclusivist. His illusion is that a universal God is on the side of pure Islam against impure or non-Islamists. (more…)

Nonviolence Rejects ‘Othering’ … and Topples Dictators

by Winslow Myers

Muhammar Khaddafy’s brutal reaction to the aspirations of his own people is becoming a textbook case in the futility of opposing the citizens from whose consent a leader’s political authority derives, however illegitimately. Instead, his stubborn egotism has led to absurd violence, even civil war. At moments like this, the world trembles with indignation and apprehensive hope.

The non-violent invincibility of people power, the argument of Jonathan Schell’s underrated masterpiece of political philosophy, The Unconquerable World, may be coming true before our eyes again as it did in the Philippines in 1986 and Czechoslovakia in 1989. We do not yet know which model will dominate in the short run in the Middle East and Northern Africa, the violence of state power, or the nonviolence of citizens seeking their rights as leaders abdicate peacefully. Citizen invincibility is not manifesting in all cases without additional tragic sacrifice to the callous will of dictators. But in the end it will prevail. (more…)

Thinking Whole, and Not Just Apart

by Winslow Myers

I still recall the shock of reading the philosopher Krishnamurti’s bald assertion, in his little book “Freedom from the Known,” that I was personally responsible for everything. The book was recommended to me by a remarkable man named Albert Bigelow. In 1958, Bert sailed his small ketch, the Golden Rule, into an American nuclear testing area in the Marshall Islands in an act of protest. Bert took seriously the obligation of being a global citizen long before the phrase “global citizen” was coined.

In 2010, the burden of trying to act responsibly for the planet as a whole has become overwhelming, almost paralyzing. There are so many huge challenges, all interrelated, and the cause-and-effect relationship between what I do personally in my daily life and those planet-wide challenges has become infinitely clearer than it was to all but a few in 1958. (more…)