At the Mahatma Gandhi Center for
Global Nonviolence, we are exploring the significance for the
contemporary world of the great task Mahatma Gandhi set for himself
and for all of us as an experiment and an actual experience. "My
mission," he said, "is to convert…the world to non-violence
for regulating mutual relations, whether political, economic,
social, or religious." Our work is based on distinctively Gandhian
insights, methods, and strategies. It addresses a set of problems
that are uniquely urgent, and it represents a uniquely promising
potential to make a positive difference on a global
scale.
Uniqueness however is both an
ancient vice and a quintessentially modern virtue. The ancients
knew that there is "nothing new under the sun," as a wise yet
depressed sage observed in the Hebrew Bible, and that anything
claiming to be "new" was unlikely to be worthwhile. Moderns reverse
the traditional scale of values and are ever seeking something that
claims to be new and different. Mahatma Gandhi was both an heir to
ancient values and the singularly influential "nonviolent
revolutionary" of the twentieth century who reworked inherited
wisdom into a plan of action suited to an age of technologically
fueled empires and global access to communication.
Gandhian nonviolence brings hope for
the future of humanity. For Mahatma Gandhi the opposite of war is
not peace but ahimsa. He never
used the word "santi," which is an
equivalent for the English word "peace" in the sense of ultimate
union of the soul with the Divine. The peace for which we usually
pray and ask others to pray would be translated by the word
"sandhi," meaning truce,
suspension of war. What Gandhi taught is
ahimsa, which consists in total
avoidance of harm to another, in thought, in speech, in action. For
him this is neither a doctrine nor a dogma: it is an action, an act
of every moment. In contrast, more typical appeals to "Peace!" are
what Hamlet would qualify as "Words, Words, Words!" in answer to
Polonius' query.
Mahatma Gandhi did not preach
nonviolence. He did not ask others to pray for it. He acted out his
ahimsa. He never swerved from the
belief that a pure, noble end must be sought and attained by the
execution of pure, noble means. He vigorously eschewed the argument
that some evil means can be condoned if the end happens to be
satisfactory. Nor could he advocate the choice of a lesser evil as
a necessity to avoid being coerced into adopting a bigger evil, for
the choice of the lesser evil is always evil.
Education is a key to preparing
people to appreciate the value of nonviolence, the potential of
nonviolent action to address conflicts, the value of social
responsibility, the interconnected nature of all human experience,
and the planet's natural environment.
The Center is a non-partisan and
non-sectarian enterprise that welcomes both secular and faith-based
participants in its programs as well as secular non-governmental
organizations.
The Center was established on March
4, 2005.
