Brian Greene, professor of physics and Mathematics at Columbia University, describes one of the marks of being human is the ability to create words, concrete and abstract. Language is the means to remember the past, participate in the present and imagine the future. Language facilitates interior thinking and communal communication. Language enables consideration of an unlimited spectrum of ideas.
It is that range of ideas that is so desperately needed in the contemporary world burdened with leaders, including the government of the United States, who are locked into the repetitive use of the coercive power of war, economic superiority, hegemony and an unimaginative historical male dominated society. We are told that the only way forward is to repeat the past with more urgency. For many people, this approach leads to despair, depression, anger and fear.
I attended the Nonviolence Festival on the State House lawn this past weekend. Language in many forms articulated alternative ways of nonviolence and the visions of a peaceful world. There were over two dozen different displays by several religious groups and by organizations of women, elders, Veterans for Peace and New Hampshire Peace Action. Members of these groups strayed from their displays to move about the lawn, listening to each other and telling their stories about their involvement in the movement for nonviolence. A few others came by to peruse the displays and pick up swag.
However, even at this Nonviolence Festival I met people discouraged and desperate. The individuals I talked with were committed to the ways of peace but filled with doubt that there would ever be an end to social, economic and kinetic warfare. It seems that their imagination about how to accomplish their ideals had reached its limit, even amidst the many variations of nonviolence thought on display.
These displays prompted some people to talk not only about aspirations but to vent their feelings of frustration and fear, anger and disillusionment. These people gave accounts of experiencing mean-spirited pushback as a result of their advocacy. That and the existence of unbridled social and political aggression had drained any optimism that might have motivate them to believe in the possibility of a time when nonviolence would reign. Some felt that the nonviolent movement was “nothing but words.”
And yet, we are surrounded with examples of words empowering possibilities. We need only to “use our little grey cells,” as the fictional detective, Hercule Poirot urges. Those cells form words. Words are the vehicles for concepts and imagination. Communicating those ideas with other people results in collaboration.
Beginning with the harnessing of fire and the creation of the wheel, verbal collaboration has made possible the complexities of the modern world: transportation, medicine, the architecture of buildings and bridges, the enrichment of farmlands, the intricacies of machinery, literature and the arts, philosophy and religion, and the creation of solar panels, wind turbines, computers and the digital network. Physicist Brian Greene describes the power of the human brain as having the ability to “combine and recombine a finite collection of phonemes to yield intricate … and virtually unlimited sequences of sounds conveying a virtually unlimited spectrum of ideas.”
Likewise, it is so with the matters of peace and the methods of nonviolence. Using the unlimited spectrum of ideas, our brains have the language power to promote peace, overcoming wars and rumors of wars that seem so inescapable. The human brain is capable of articulating infinite options and creating countless ways to bring the possibilities of nonviolence into reality. Those displays on the State House Capitol lawn: the words on the banners, the descriptions of resources, and the audible conversations contain the influence and power of nonviolence needed to construct a way of peace in the land. In the words of the Starfleet Captain Jean-Luc Picard, “Make it so!”
John Buttrick writes from his Vermont Folk Rocker in his Concord home, Minds Crossing.