On A Philosophy of Non-Violence and It's Social History

The evolution of common governance toward normative non-violence originated perhaps with Jesus of Nazareth and His crucifixion upon the true cross. Though his kingdom was not of this world his trial and suffering was. The essence of human social conflict over scarce resources, political and personal power is a perennial theme of a myriad forms.

In Afghanistan today we are concerned with the variegated and tragic human social conflicts that have overtaken the nation since the end of the positive and reconstructive era of Mohammad Zahir Shah. Wars in Afghanistan since 1978 have been of civil and tribal, narco-trafficking and political, sectarian and ethnic kinds. In an interregnum of centralized social authority or when the balance of local political autonomy and security breaks down conflicts—slip strike social faults appear to grind and subduct peace and non-violence in the abysses of hell.

The pit of despair-the unwillingness to be oneself overtakes many experiencing unlimited insults and injuries of outrageous fortune. Individuals seek the opportune and desirable goods opulently shimmering as ripe fruits in good health as experience and growth present. Little philosophical thought may need to develop or be encouraged before disaster suddenly overtakes one or falls like an avalanche upon society en mass burying it under layers of pathos, anomie and oppression. Individuals searching for non-violent paths to progress in a violent worldline encounter additional challenges in the varieties of personal and religious experience.

In considering protocols of normative human social interaction non-violent personal social transactions are considered basic in advanced modern civilizations. No longer may one pay for the product and shoot the vendor with a quick draw as he has his hands full pocketing the money to get an instant rebate. Non-violence at the personal level in all manners of human social exchange is required for the smooth flow of social progress, personal and mass security.

It is at a higher level through carefully moderated governance that violence essentially as a form of self defense is licensed on occasion. The consequences of unjust use of self defense premises at a personal or social level may be as harmful for the perpetrator as the victim as the empirical realm of social justice and development of better ways of living individually and concatenated as social products arise best when violent disruption is not a concern.
Solid-state physics is the realm above that of the quantum mechanical in which atoms and their compound constructions may be considered. There are innumerable formations of study in solid-state physics and many with emergent properties. Protocols of stability and change arise in the process of thermodynamic flow.

A stable state of any physical system without violent disruption is best. Some systems are not susceptible to individuated violent change—water for example. Water molecules of hydrogen and oxygen simply are in a somewhat randomized yet stable form. With lowered temperature water may be converted into a more regular ice crystal construction yet there aren’t any fundamental attacks or annihilations of one molecule by another.

A pervasive structural assault upon water by heating it to steam or lowering its temperature might occur—even oil might be spilled into it to alter its regional state—I am not aware of additives that would make heavy water-deuterium out of random seawater molecules in the ocean or otherwise alter it through individuated fusion into being something besides water. If human society or the human species may be compared to water or another element of basically similar composition we find that it too tends generally toward non-destruction of its own kind through violence. Perhaps the matter-anti-matter annihilation hypothesized to occur within the first second of the history of this universe (within a big bang model) could be taken as a paradigm of advisory for the danger human society could present to itself through mass violence and through the totalization of political and or religious systems globally.

If an economic totalization of the world could be taken as an equivalent of a unified state of compacted human social freedom such as a Higgs Field with Internet potential for instability in the beginning, its catastrophic transition in hyper-radiation of matter and anti-matter that then recombined and exploded as radiation is an example of the potential for an annihilating economic and sectarian explosion annihilating in time 99.9999 percent of humanity in the recombining conflict of chaos into order. Violence is transitional and catastrophic phenomena of societies in disorder as well as a comparable destruction of individual, personal health and economic security.

Prospects for a non-violent society rise as individual rights are reinforced materially with personal property and a coinciding healthy recovering ecology of a nation. Particular, intelligent national economic and ecological policies today and a stable social and religious stasis may require that the arrested Muslim civilization remain so and not resume its geography based expansion as a fire of consumption to transform the world into an ulema or realm controlled by Muslim law.

Allowing the United States to be transformed through immigration of Muslims into a more active, agitating Muslim axis of evil would be as harmful for the prospects of national and world peace as resumption of a cold war between communism and capitalism. The expansion of totalitarian systems hell-bent upon world conquest advances society toward that midnight hour of self-destruction. Forthright, determined resistance by American leadership to immigration of Muslims along with a new policy of more care in engaging in either corporate investment in the Muslim world or political engagement with it within military forms would permit a national posture more like that of Soren Kiergeguaard’s ‘armed neutrality’. Muslims should believe that the United States will certainly not attacking them with violence and have no interest in compelling them to submit to a worldly political or religious philosophy, but that in any case if Muslims attack the United States a condign, accurate and appropriate response will be inevitable, punitive and sure.

If one may regard the world as a physical system and the people within it as the elements of that system, we find its best contemporary prospects for non-violent political stability in an essential maintenance of a status quo with a fundamental phase transition into a localization of economic activity founded in renewable ecological activity. The areas in which global cooperation might best occur would be in scientific researches and exchanges of information to recover polluted ecosystems, protect endangered species and allow for a global wildlife structure insinuated amidst of the local political-economic nationalities.

Violence is a response to external challenges. It isn’t by any means the only or necessarily best response to external challenges. Control of the challenges through applications of human though while praying for extra help from God to accomplish moral ecological and social actualization of self-interest is better than reliance upon violent. If one has ever punched a concrete wall in anger it is easy to discover that it is not the best existential response to adverse stimuli.

It may be that the right to exist for an individual within a social matrix in a peaceful status of non-violence is an expression of reciprocal coherent bonding values comprising a collective stability. Individual molecules disturbed by exotic forces may understandably react with countervailing logic to restore equilibrium—this is self defense, while the collective impact of the coherent structure en mass—perhaps we will consider an eleven dimensional membrane universe as the collective mass—onto another membrane universe or reductionist nationalist entity or non-governmental terrorist organization versus another of similar scale, may result in the total impact collision of momentous consequence including shattering of the collective into a myriad of individual micro-universes chaotically spinning off in their own directions within a pervasive vacuum energy field of unknown alignment.

The dissolution of a state or universe membrane may be contrasted with the intaking of an encountered collective force-object that may cause political gas requiring the antacid of much political maneuvering and working to achieve a new stable membrane or national configuration.
Violence is an undesirable application of force toward a direct object or indirectly attained object for the purpose of involuntary pattern-form of being alteration. There are a variety of means through which individuals and organizations may work illicitly to force the destruction of the freedom and existential integrity of individuals or societies intentionally. Jesus Christ at his trial was asked if he was a king. He did not deny it, but said that his kingdom is not of this world, while the hierarchical priesthood that orchestrated his crucifixion sought to control state security through compliance with secular power of an empire with a pagan religious base and its political requirements of exclusivity. Some states require religious exclusivity while others postulate religious decontrol or tolerance. No state that wishes to continue to exist tolerates seditious organizations that use violence to establish a theocratic new government however.

The meanings of force and its applications within human societies in all times and circumstances is challenging to encapsulate and write about regarding appropriate response. Human social development in which all interests may work toward their own ends freely and without coercion from other individuals or groups is a worthy ideal. The methods to accomplish that may entail quite a few incompletions and failures. Adam Smith said, “There is a good deal of ruin in a nation”.

For much of the social environment of the world violence is a common occurrence, even the norm. Traditional tribal patronage systems of social justice in Afghanistan have been attacked by totalitarian governments, terrorists and narco-traffickers, in Africa the Sudan and Somalia, The Congo and Zimbabwe have experience a multifaceted social assault upon ordinary security. State orchestrated violence upon civilians has become a norm of policy. The United States has become an advocate of democracy and human rights too occasionally, yet as Isby said ‘Elections are a tool for democracy, not a replacement for it”. Sham elections are too often good enough to satisfy news requirements and unreasonable western expectations of nominal democracy from the top down.

Violence by the state and its agents is an inevitable aspect of the corruption of power as Acton well expressed; ‘power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely’. Unthinking wits sometimes reason thence toward the absolute power of God in a kind of logical reductio to absurdum to support their atheistic preference to justify their own power. God is not absolutely corrupt because he is absolutely powerful. The power human beings have intrasocially is in no way similar to the absolute goodness of God. Ultimately God has power only over Himself and the things he has ordained. Rather than power as the solely true existing non-contingent being, God has a horrible, mysterious ultimate burden as the only exiting being, and the only one that truly understands the ultimate origin and reason for absolutely everything.

In ancient Iran/Persia perhaps in the 9th century B.C. a philosopher named Zarathustra was said to have lived. Some of his ideas are known to history indirectly through the reports of others. Zarathustra’s ideas on good and evil, on the nature of reality as a war between good and evil started one of the worlds major religions (extirpated largely by Muslim rulers of Iran) and influenced countless other philosophers right to Nietzsche and Schopenhaur. Zarathustra's basic ideas were not the first philosophy to originate from the high plains and deserts of Iran and the upper Indus river region.

The ancient upper Indus River beyond Today’s Peshawar, Rawalpindi and Islamabad was a life-sustaining waterway down which the originators of the Indus civilization of the 4th century B.C. received religious and philosophical ideas from travelers and migrating tribes of the north. Afghanistan and Iran are not too far from the Indus River of Pakistan. The journey of the forerunning ideas of ancient Brahmanism and the caste system to maintain tribal patrilineal structures and social structure that evolved in coherent versions even unto today were also concerned with good, evil and basic human and physical relationships.

Within the philosophical and religious explanations of the ultimate origin of the Universe and of its purpose cohered natural laws regarding amicable human relations and the quest for the transcendence of the problem of evil. Human societies fought to overcome injustice and evil in various ways—often fighting others and other tribes. Violence sometime was a coincidental effect of groups and organizations pursuing their idea of the right in efforts to actualize submission to religious law regarding right and wrong and ultimate teleology.

That some ancient civilizations fought to exert the authority of a religious power of their idea of the good and of natural law over others outside of their political patrimony was a tragic consequent of the failure of human communications, of human understanding, and the brevity of life and economic-ecological level of civilization of the era. I would not offer the opinion that all ancient civilization pursued the sublime, the good and beautiful knowledge of God, in fat some were followers of a pagan god of war, or just plain hell raising megalomaniacs with guns and weapons searching for places to plunder. Not all human beings received insights into deeper philosophical interests equally or at a coinciding time period.

We learn that Abraham received his word from God around 2100 B.C. Originally from the headwaters area of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in Syria so far as a proximal basic historical etymology goes sufficient for this essay, Abraham’s Jewish forebears traveled down river to Ur and were thus situated to communicate and vie versa with the high plainsmen from two directions.

We may wonder if the inspiring word of God that seems to have a common origin for the people of the Indus Valley, for Zarathustra, for the Buddhist additions beyond the eightfold path—itself a renormalization list for an individual to the natural law during a time of an interregnum in social and religious authority, and Abraham were from one great inspiration. The inspiration may have been from the Jews early in the third millennium B.C. who ventured from Syria uphill to Iran with the influence conveyed through the Aryans unto the Indus Valley, Zarathustra and via Brahmanism and its descendent Hinduism to the Buddha in the 5th century. The sky god, the recurrent contingent universe of Brahma as a non-contingent beings, a fifty billion year future universe cycle of recurrence, the syncretism of Mohammad and its apocalyptic belief that Jesus would return to lead an army against the Jews that had him crucified—the ultimate origin of these ideas may have been that of a solitary Jewish profit with an insight from God about the nature of reality that has become quite obscure transformed through many permutations over the millennia. We may be sure however that these religious efforts were in part reinforced socially to form social patterns in coherence with natural patterns of living and given the power of laws. These laws would minimize violence.

Jesus Christ transcended the old ways of religious formations that had become ossified by his time and freed humankind from the restricting bonds of secular religious forms pervasively. The enforcement of these religious forms-varieties of Sharia for example that create conflicting clerical relationships in Afghanistan and elsewhere as various groups form their own selections of elements to accentuate from Sunni Hanafi to the ulema of Shuras in Northern Afghanistan creates possibilities for conflict with strivings for assertion of authority.
Violence in pursuit of what is right can be socially destabilizing when irrationally exuberant and a means of evil for-itself.