Summer/Fall 2008 Featured Story Active Nonviolence: Transforming the Scripts by Ken Butigan Imagine that we are fidgeting in our seats waiting for William Shakespeare’s Hamlet to begin. After the lights go down – and the Danish Prince first meets his father’s regal but forlorn ghost on the grounds of Elsinore – the rest of the world gradually and imperceptibly begins to fade away. For the moment, we forget the hassles at work, the hurried dinner, the nerve-wracking traffic on the way to the playhouse. Almost against our will, we have entered the playwright’s world of betrayal, revenge, and existential quandary. As this world enfolds us, we begin to forget that these are actors standing before us and that they are declaiming speeches written by a dramatist now dead almost 400 years. We are so drawn into the experience of this performance that when Hamlet cleverly feigns insanity or when Ophelia actually crosses from the province of coherence to the realm of madness, this world becomes for the briefest span of time the real world. This experience of believing, even for only an instant, that the play is reality – and that everything else is either forgotten or is an illusion – is an important key to our general behavior as human beings. The theater is a mirror which helps us see that human life is often a series of dramas with its scripts, props, directions, troupe of players, and entrances and exits. And like our experience of watching Hamlet, we are often convinced that the “everyday plays” in which we participate are reality. Envisioning and building a culture of creative nonviolence includes transforming the dramatic frames of the theater of violence and injustice in which we find ourselves. Changing this world will mean breaking its spell and re-writing its social and personal scripts, including the numbingly rote (and often invisible) scripts of violence, domination, and injustice that masquerade as the real. These scripts have ancient plot-lines that play out in a ceaseless spiral of retaliatory violence. Roles are assigned, people are type-cast, and the action of the play inexorably moves toward a bad ending, with the whole cycle starting over again at the next performance. When the world is a theater of violence, the roles are strictly limited. There is the Aggressor. There is the Accommodator. There is the Avoider. There is the Counter-Aggressor. The scripts for each of these roles keep the conflicts of our lives from ever being genuinely resolved. Smothered … perhaps. Escalated … quite likely. Out of balance … without a doubt. When we choose to play one of these parts in the grand theatrical production of violent conflict … the emotional, verbal, or physical violence in our own homes, in our work places, in the streets, or on the national and international scene – we march in step on the treadmill of suffering and dehumanization. Why do we continue to play these limited roles in this second rate play of personal and social violence? Because we think that this is reality. How many times have we thought to ourselves that nonviolence is a nice idea, but it doesn’t work in the real world? How many times have we mumbled to ourselves that the vision of compassion is just that: a pretty, shiny vision, but one that is impractical and even delusory? We catch ourselves thinking that power politics, coercion, threat, and brute force are the “bottom line.” Everything else is a fairy tale. More typically still, we do not think about it at all. It is the world in which we live and move. It is “the way things are.” These patterns of behavior, through their pervasiveness and force, make a fundamental metaphysical claim to be the ultimate reality. In a subtle but relentless way, violence asserts that it is the horizon of meaning and the ground of being, that it is the beginning and end of things, and that there is no escaping its reach. Yet, however convincing this assertion appears to be given the facts we face daily, it is an idolatrous illusion. The violence system – with its cultural and personal scenarios and styles of behavior – is a highly sophisticated construction that we reinforce and render allegiance to every time we address conflict by means of aggression, accommodation, avoidance, or counter-aggression. It is a deadly melodrama with no exit: only a repetition, again and again, of the grim script of death. In their pivotal book, The Social Construction of Reality, Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann outlined how social systems are not metaphysical givens but are constructed, reinforced, and defended. Scripts of violence, though enshrined at the heart of a culture, can be re-written. Scenarios of violence, though reinforced endlessly and thus often becoming well-grooved neural pathways, can be transformed.
Nonviolent transformation requires that we interrupt the tired theatrical performance of violence – being played out in our own lives and in the life of the world – and provoke the creation of a new script. This new script is truly novel and transformative in every way when it is not a socially-produced and sanctioned code or scenario – imposed from the outside even though it may be internalized – but the fruit of an inner metanoia or conversion. In short, it is a dramatized and embodied experience of transformative love. For example, when a group of women living in Boyle Heights in East Los Angeles decided to begin what they termed “love walks” in the middle of a gang battleground, they rejected the traditional script which told them to stay behind their bolted doors while the young men of the community killed one another. They broke the rules of war – an ancient script with innumerable variations – and set in motion a new dynamic which has borne much fruit in the barrio. Their presence – with guitars and prayer books, salsa and chips – upset expectations and opened space for discussion and trust-building. This led to a new bond between the women and the members of the gangs, which in turn resulted in the creation of a series of projects aimed at developing jobs, building skills, and resolving conflicts. True nonviolence enacts a new script. Using the most powerful symbols we have at our disposal – our own vulnerable, creaky, resilient bodies energized by the spirit of reconciling love -- nonviolence embody an alternative to the traditional “operating systems” on which our culture operates. It challenges us to dramatize possibilities where none existed before, enacting a drama that forgoes the typical bad ending for one that is more human and just. Active nonviolence is this process of revision and re-enactment. We are again in the theater, watching Hamlet. Suppose that just before the machinery of the bloody ending begins to gather its relentless momentum, the Prince unexpectedly tosses out the four-century-old script that Shakespeare gave him and finds a dramatic and satisfying way to help bring the woundedness and pain of all parties – including his own – to the surface. This process of recounting their deep suffering proves to be enormously cathartic, and all gradually agree to create together a resolution to their deep-seated conflict, one that honors each person’s partial truth and pinpoint of sacredness. We may not be able to re-write Shakespeare, but active nonviolence challenges us to see and transform the deadly cultural and personal scripts that we blindly rehearse and perform. If all the world’s a stage, it is a stage where we can produce a drama which is unexpectedly, creatively, and lovingly human. Ken Butigan is communications director and interim executive director of Pace e Bene Nonviolence Service. He has authored several books on peacemaking, developed the From Violence to Wholeness curriculum, and organized national initiatives to address diverse issues such as an end to homelessness, freedom for East Timor, peace in Central America, and a comprehensive peace plan for Iraq.
©2008 Fellowship of Reconciliation |
