Michael Nagler's Page
http://mettacenter.org/author/michael/
Michael Nagler is one of the most respected scholars and advocates of nonviolence worldwide. He is Professor Emeritus of Classics and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, where he founded the Peace and Confl ict Studies Program, now one of the largest of its kind in...
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Michael Nagler posted a blog post
Infrastructure of Peace: Daily Metta
Training for military revolt means learning the use of arms, ending perhaps in the atomic bomb. For Civil Disobedience it means the Constructive Program. ~ Gandhi, Constructive Program, forward to 1945 edition, p. iii It is very interesting how Gandhi locates Constructive Program (CP) in a p...
April 19, 2017
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Michael Nagler posted a blog post
“Individual Civil Disobedience among an unprepared people and by leaders not known to or trusted by them is of no avail, and mass Civil Disobedience is an impossibility.” ~ Gandhi, Young India, January 9, 1930 Because we are unschooled in civil disobedience, or almost any dimension of nonvio...
April 19, 2017
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Michael Nagler posted a blog post
“Not to believe in the possibility of permanent peace is to disbelieve in the Godliness of human nature.” ~ Gandhi, Truth is God, 144 Which is just the problem. Many people today do not believe in the Godliness of human nature, even if they profess to believe in God. The besetting problem in t...
April 19, 2017
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Michael Nagler posted a blog post
“Diversity there certainly is in the world, but it means neither inequality nor untouchability.” ~ Gandhi, Mahatma, vol. 3, 230 Gandhi wrote long before diversity became what we’d call these days a meme and core value of the ecological movement, before we recognized how essential it is in the ...
April 19, 2017
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Michael Nagler posted a blog post
Supreme Consideration: Daily Metta
“The supreme consideration is man. The machine should not tend to make atrophied the limbs of man.” ~ Gandhi,Young India, November 13, 1924 Gandhi is in so many ways more nuanced than he is taken for: people think he was a kind of luddite, against machinery. He was not against anything, really...
April 19, 2017
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Michael Nagler posted a blog post
Under certain circumstances fasting is the one weapon which God has given us for use in times of utter helplessness.… Absence of food is an indispensable but not the largest part of it. The largest part is the prayer – communion with God. It more than adequately replaces physical food. ~ Gandh...
April 19, 2017
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Michael Nagler posted a blog post
“The greatest tragedy is a hopeless unwillingness of the villagers to better their lot.” ~ Gandhi, Harijan, January 9, 1937 It is indeed a tragedy: that people who have been belittled and oppressed so often take on the message of their own unworthiness put forward by their oppressors. But a...
April 19, 2017
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Michael Nagler posted a blog post
Money is Not Life: Daily Metta
“All have not the same capacity. It is in the nature of things, impossible.… I would allow a man of intellect to earn more, I would not cramp his talent.” ~ Gandhi, Young India, November 26, 1931 Is this inequality? Not quite. Because earning more doesn’t mean being better; money is not life. ...
April 19, 2017
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Michael Nagler posted a blog post
Human-centered Reality: Daily Metta
“I make bold to say that the Europeans themselves will have to remodel their outlook if they are not to perish under the weight of the comforts to which they are becoming slaves.” ~ Gandhi, Young India, October 7, 1931 As we’ve seen elsewhere, Gandhi became aware already during his trial by fi...
April 19, 2017
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Michael Nagler posted a blog post
Mass-media Culture: Daily Metta
“The political domination of England is bad enough. The cultural is infinitely worse.… When the cultural domination is complete the political will defy resistance.” ~ Gandhi, Young India, July 9, 1925 Recently Thomas Friedman wrote that the (disastrous) result of the 2016 presidential election...
April 19, 2017
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Michael Nagler posted a blog post
“Mere withdrawal of the English is not independence. It means the consciousness and the average villager that he is the maker of his own destiny, he is his own legislator through his chosen representative.” ~ Gandhi, Young India, February 13, 1930 We are familiar by now with the key doctrine t...
April 19, 2017
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Michael Nagler posted a blog post
Observation & Experience: Daily Metta
“Non-violence, being the mightiest force in the world, and also the most elusive in its working, demands the greatest exercise of faith.” ~ Gandhi, Mahatma 5, p. 17 In the words of Augustine and later Fathers of the Church, credo ut intellegam, “I believe in order to understand.” This techniqu...
April 19, 2017
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Michael Nagler posted a blog post
“Unity among the different races and the different communities belonging to different religions of India is indispensable to the birth of national life.” ~ Gandhi, CWMG, xxvi, p. 241 Substitute different political outlooks and change “birth” to “rebirth,” and you have a perfect description of ...
April 19, 2017
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Michael Nagler posted a blog post
“I will not go underground. I will not go into shelter. I will come out in the open and let the pilot see I have not a trace of ill will against him.… The longing in our hearts—that he will not come to harm—would reach up to him and his eyes would be opened. If those thousands who were done t...
April 19, 2017
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Michael Nagler posted a blog post
“The force of the spirit is ever progressive and endless… That force resides in everybody; man, woman, and child, irrespective of the color of the skin. Only in many it lies dormant, but it is capable of being awakened by judicious training.” ~ Gandhi, Harijan, February 10, 1946 “Training” has...
April 19, 2017
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Michael Nagler posted a blog post
“For India to enter into the race for armaments is to court suicide. With the loss of India to nonviolence the last hope of the world will be gone.” ~ Gandhi, Harijan, October 14, 1939 We would have to say that India is not altogether lost to nonviolence; that flame can be seen if not in the h...
April 19, 2017
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Michael Nagler posted a blog post
“I may deliver up my soul with the remembrance of God on my lips.” ~ Gandhi, Pyarelal, Last Phase, II, p. 101 It seems fitting to end our second year with Gandhiji with this magnificent testimony. For this, of course, was exactly what he did, deliver up his soul with the words “Rama Rama Rama...
April 19, 2017
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Michael Nagler posted a blog post
“The German Jews will score a lasting victory over the German Gentiles in the sense that they will have converted the latter to an appreciation of human dignity.” Harijan, November 26, 1938 Here we enter on one of Gandhi’s most controversial claims, that even in the crucible of the holocaust...
April 19, 2017
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Michael Nagler posted a blog post
Cultural Narrative: Daily Metta
“I address this appeal to you in the hope that our movement may even lead you. . . in the right direction, and deflect you from the course which is bound to end in your moral ruin in the reduction of human beings to robots.” ~ Gandhi, London Tribune, October 23, 1942 In our age, human beings a...
April 19, 2017
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Michael Nagler posted a blog post
“God resides in every human form, indeed in every particle of His creations, in everything that is on His earth.” ~ Gandhi, Mahtama 4. 124 In our Western worldview, to the extent that it recognizes the existence of a being we can call God, that being is said to have created the world, more or ...
April 19, 2017
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Michael Nagler posted a blog post
Notes on Nonviolence Strategy: Part 1
This first post looks at the outward aspects of strategy: creating a proactive, long-term nonviolent movement. The second part considers the inner aspects of strategy: exploring who we are as human beings and building meaningful lives. It has been heartwarming to see the passion with which m...
April 19, 2017
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Michael Nagler posted a blog post
Notes on Nonviolence Strategy: Part 2
This post is the second part of a two-part series. Part 1 looks at the outward aspects of strategy: creating a proactive, long-term nonviolent movement. This part turns to the inner aspects of strategy: exploring who we are as human beings and building meaningful lives. Man appears to be the...
April 19, 2017
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Michael Nagler posted a blog post
Disturbance at UC Berkeley: A Few Thoughts
RESONATING as it did with widespread feelings of frustration and impotence, the “successful” action last week to prevent right-wing agitator Milo Yiannopoulos from speaking at the invitation of student Republicans on the Berkeley campus has been met with a certain grudging admiration even by ...
April 19, 2017
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Michael Nagler posted a blog post
October 2, 2016 is the 147th birthday of Mahatma Gandhi. A time for reflection, no doubt, and today that’s bound to be sobering. Violence is eroding the human mind, body, and spirit, indeed life in general, almost—but not quite everywhere. It is just about everywhere that most people would ev...
October 4, 2016
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Michael Nagler posted a blog post
“A democrat must be utterly selfless. He (or she) must think and dream, not in terms of self or of party, but only of democracy.” ~ Gandhi, Mahatma, 5.104 Would it not be safe to say that the system we have at present here, to one extent or another, in other democracies so-called has produced...
October 4, 2016
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Michael Nagler posted a blog post
“Ahimsa means the eradication of the desire to injure or to kill.” ~ Gandhi, CWMG, XIV, 463 Once again, intuition, spiritual insight, outruns scientific knowledge. Gandhi could not have known that a-hiṃsā is most probably what linguists call a desiderative based on the root √han, “injure, str...
October 4, 2016
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Michael Nagler posted a blog post
“Man does not live by bread alone. Many prefer self-respect to food.” ~ Gandhi, Young India, February 5, 1925 Which is why some will go so far as to fast from food, if necessary “unto death,” to restore their dignity—or that of their religion or their people. We forget, in some of the shoutin...
September 30, 2016
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Michael Nagler posted a blog post
“There is considerable force in the warning given by the Prophet against his disciples copying his fasting over and above the semi-fasts of Ramzan. ‘My Maker sends me food enough when I fast, not so to you,’ said the Prophet.” ~ Gandhi, Gandhi’s Health Guide (Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 2000)...
September 30, 2016
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Michael Nagler posted a blog post
“To prepare for home-rule individuals must cultivate the spirit of service, renunciation, truth, nonviolence, self-restraint, patience. They must engage in constructive work in order to develop these qualities.” ~ Gandhi, Young India, January 8, 1925 This is a tall order. It’s very helpful fo...
September 30, 2016
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Michael Nagler posted a blog post
“I am an uncompromising opponent of violent methods even to serve the noblest of causes. Experience convinces me that permanent good can never be the outcome of untruth and violence. Even if my belief is a fond delusion, it will be admitted that it is a fascinating delusion.” ~ Gandhi, Young I...
September 30, 2016
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Michael Nagler is now a member of Berrett-Koehler Community
