Peace, Pacifism and Boundaries of Power and Force

Adam Sargant, Animystic.org

I’ve never called myself a pacifist. To me, Ghandi (as an example) was a pacifist. His followers were pacifists. And I deeply admire someone who will stick by their principles and not offer a blow up to those who would attack them, using their own determination to hold to principle as a transformative strategy. Such determination, such conviction is a powerful social and political force. It challenges the attacker, over time, and it challenges witnesses to assess their paradigms and world views. I am not that sort of pacifist, yet the belief and conviction resonates with me so strongly I am forced to ask myself just what is the common ground between my position and that of the adherents to the doctrine of Satyagraha.

I believe it was Buckminster Fuller who said “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” (I cannot give you a reference for this… I came across it as one of those inspirational quotes on the internet, so cannot vouch for its veracity or accuracy. But Fuller was an early influence of mine, and the words seem in keeping with the man’s thinking). This seems to reach to the core of the transformative power of Satyagraha. “The Satyagrahi’s object is to convert, not to coerce, the wrong-doer.”^[1] The aim of the Satyagrahi, as I understand it, is to transform the relationship between them and the aggressor or assailant. And the tools at the Satyagrahi’s disposal are not simply a passive response to violence, but an active and committed adherence to Truth. I’m going to dare to suggest that the methods available to the Satyagrahi are available to those who, through choice and consideration, may draw the boundaries regarding the use of force slightly differently.

It might make sense to give a bit of personal background. I was, for many years, a psychiatric nurse working with mentally disordered criminal (frequently violent) offenders. There were always elements of this role that sat ill with me, particularly the coercive administration of medication. I have particular views as to the nature of mental illness which I discuss in detail elsewhere² but I made a conscious decision to work in this field. As part of my role, I was required to be trained in the physical restraint of the violent individual. Having accepted that role I decided that I was under a moral obligation to carry it out to the best of my ability and so I opted to train as a trainer.

This plunged me into a bizarre world. The Control and Restraint (C&R) Trainers training (as it was known then) was carried out by a team of staff at Broadmoor Special Hospital, one of a few hospitals in the UK that took in some of the most violent mentally disordered offenders in the UK. These staff were often ex-servicemen, prison guards or police. The C&R training was originally developed alongside that for the Prison Service. The air fair stank of testosterone and the environment was, as you can imagine, massively macho. It was an acknowledged fact that after a team of care staff had been trained in a hospital, the number of physical restraints escalated for a short period, presumably indicative of the hyped up, wanting to be “blooded” state induced in the trainees. We were trained to teach the techniques over a period of five days. The training was focused entirely on physical skills. We would teach staff to restrain and relocate violent individuals to a safe place and then we would say to them “and this is where would use your communication skills.”

So step back a second. Just what was the purpose of training nursing and care staff in these skills? The sole purpose was the reduction of physical harm that was likely to occur to staff, patients and the aggressor. It quickly became clear to a group of us that something was flawed in this approach to training. Over time we modified the training so the trainees had the opportunity to reflect on their practice and its objectives. We introduced explicit opportunities to introduce communication skills. It was, and is, my belief that once someone has lost the control that results in violent behaviour, it was my job to remove the responsibility for their behaviour for a short time and take control of the consequences as best we could, but always, always to be working towards returning responsibility as quickly and safely as possible. I counted it as a proud moment, and as a validation of my approach, when a patient approached me one shift after I had needed to restrain him and thanked me for taking control at that time, because he didn’t have to live with the consequences of what he might have done. It was a further proud moment when a team of staff under our training had become involved in a restraint and yet dissected the antecedents and consequences with compassion for the patient and reflection on the impact of their own behaviours. Approached in the right way, restraint did not have to be counter-therapeutic, it could actually become part of the therapeutic toolkit. These people were not my adversaries, they were, for that period of time, my wards, and the responsibility I bore to them was immense.

Enough about the context, so what? What am I trying to drive at here and how does it impact on developing spiritually and personally? I’m saying that the necessary use of force (and by necessary, I’m talking about intervening in such a way as to limit the potential harm done by doing less harm yourself) does not conflict with the principle of non-coercion. When the assailant is viewed as your brother or sister, your spiritual kin, you cannot be in adversarial relationship with them. By trusting, and judging, one’s ability to hand back the responsibility, and to stay with the assailant to work through whatever had given rise to the loss of control, one is not committing an act of violence but an act of commitment to their well being, their physical, psychological and spiritual integrity.

I read an article in the New Scientist recently. The author, Metin Basoglu, describes the research he was involved in “of 1358 Bosnian Muslims, Bosnian Serbs, Croats and Serbs in countries of the former Yugoslavia, who had experienced a wide range of war events, including combat, torture, forced displacement, refugee status and bombardmen.”³ In the article he describes, compellingly in my view, how violence exists in a cycle of adversarial labeling and retaliation and how the behaviour of individuals and nations continue to feed that cycle. I was somewhat naively surprised that the article needed to be written and the study carried out, it seemed so self-evident to me. A quick review of the comments convinced me I was wrong. As an animist, I believe that consciousness, indeed life and spirit, derive from the causal feedback loops that maintain and sustain manifest reality and as such, the mass of causal feedback loops that perpetuate these cycles of hate and destruction are indeed palpable, alive and conscious. Malevolent spirits that are fed by our attachment to them and the emotions produced. As peace makers, as spiritual warriors, we need to understand these cycles and our place within them. A true peace maker can exist in the heart of violence and become the new model that makes the old model obsolete, thus transforming the nature of his relationship with those who would seek conflict with him.

Adam Sargant used to be a psychiatric nurse in the UK but now develops web applications that facilitate campaigning, communication and collaborative thinking for small to medium sized not-for-profit and progressive campaigning organisations. He is at a loss to explain the change in direction. An apostate Druid, he has always been an animist but only discovered the word a few years ago. He now considers himself a Brythonic lay pagan, Brythonic in the sense that it describes his relationship with the land and its stories. His occasional incoherent musings can be found at Animystic.org.