Category: JustThinkin

Violence, Nonviolence, Real, Imaginary, Powers, Principalities

I am still deeply grooving on Nonviolent Communication. Joined the NVC parenting yahoo group. Working on it in my own life. Finding it helpful.

Got a couple books tonight. The Powers That Be by Walter Wink. It’s a condensation/popularization of his Powers series. It was referred to by Marshall Rosenberg in some of his NVC writings. I’m just barely beginning it but so far I really like it. It’s a kind of theologizing that I can really appreciate.

Also, Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Super Heroes, and Make-Believe Violence. I read this a few years back and gave away my copy of it. I’d like to read it again, now that I’m reading a lot about nonviolence.

I think it might actually dovetail well with NVC. One of the things I like about NVC is that while it is studiously nonviolent, it doesn’t take a violent attitude towards violent people, so to speak. It’s about compassion, not about condemnation. It often involves finding the positive things that lie underneath objectionable, violent communication and actions, and finding ways to bring them out in ways that aren’t hurtful. In a sense it is not about avoidance of violence but about redemption from violence. About moving past it, not shrinking back from it. “I would like to suggest that killing people is too superficial,” says Rosenberg.

Killing Monsters is largely about the idea that imaginary worlds don’t play by the same rules as the real world, and things that would be harmful in the real world can be harmless or even helpful in an imaginary world, for people who can tell the real and imaginary worlds apart. Which is most people, even most little children.

In both NVC and KM I see the notion of looking beyond violence to see what positive thing is there. In NVC you’re in the real world and you’re trying to find a way to avoid the violence and get the positive thing anyway. In KM you’re talking about imaginary worlds, where the violence is not real, and can safely serve as a dramatic symbolization of the things that underlie it (power, passion, self-protection, confidence, fear, whatever else).

In both cases you have an openness to see what positive thing lies behind the violence.

And Wink apparently discusses the “Myth of Redemptive Violence” which he says underpins domination culture. I wonder how that will interact with all this?

Good reading ahead of me.

UPDATE: Read a good chunk of Wink. Looks like Wink is in direct contradiction to KM on the media issue. As far as Wink is concerned, everyone from the Enuma Elish to X-Men to Popeye is complicit in purveying the Myth of Redemptive Violence, the founding myth of Domination culture, which is what we’ve been living under for 8,000 years, since the rise of horse-oriented conquest cultures. I can’t really follow him writing off all of known human culture and artistic production for all of known history as an evil myth.

There were some things I liked a lot about what he’s saying, so I’m going to keep reading. But I have a grain of salt ready.

UPDATE: Finished Wink. It was a book with a lot of great information on topics I care a lot about, and with a lot of stuff that really made me think, and a lot of stuff I really agree with. However, the book as a whole didn’t make me go yes, yes, YES! the way some do. I like the book a lot, and huge parts of it I’m totally on board for, and I learned a lot of cool thigns from it, but there is enough in it that doesn’t quite work for me that it’s not on my list of “wonderful turn-your-mind-inside-out books.”

The Powers that Be is described as a condensation and popularization of Wink’s trilogy of more academic theological works on the Powers, and I might or might not like those better.

Non-Violent Communication: A Language of Life

After reading Michael Nagler’s The Search for a Non-Violent Future and being really excited about the possibilities of non-violent change in the world, the title of Non-Violent Communication: A Language of Life of course jumped out at me.

I read a bit of it in the bookstore and decided to buy it. It’s about communication that prevents violence, and communication which is itself non-violent in that it avoids the psychological violence of labeling, blaming, and the like.

Very few of us are in a position where we suffer or inflict physical violence, directly, on a daily basis, but we all deal with conflicts with the people around us and within ourselves, and it’s worth learning how to deal with these things without verbal or psychological violence.

Marshall Rosenberg is a clinical psychologist who’s done a lot of work trying to bring psychology out of the clinical world and into the “real” world, by holding workshops on communication in places where physical violence is a real threat — in prisons, between gangs and police, and in volatile parts of the world like Israel and Rwanda. He’s dedicated to principles of nonviolence and has been trying to work out a communicative style which embodies those principles.

I find a lot of the ideas I’ve come to embrace recently from other sources taken for granted by Dr. Rosenberg: for example, that manipulation by means pleasant or unpleasant is best avoided, or that the only real change for the good comes when “bad” people choose to become “good,” not when “bad” people are defeated by force by “good” people.

Anyway, this book describes a simple form for communicating in a non-violent way, and explores what it takes to put it into practice in both speaking and listening. It involves separating observation from evaluation, taking responsibility for one’s feelings and the needs from which they arise, and learning to make requests which are not demands.

In the week or so since I picked up the book I’ve been putting it into practice talking to my (4-year-old twin) kids, and it seems to help increase the level of sanity, clarity, and understanding in our dealings.

I also drew on some of the book’s suggestions about empathetic communication when I was helping my wife deal with an extremely frustrating situation she was dealing with that caused her a lot of anger — which I was at first at a loss as to how to respond to. Talking to her about it later in the day she said that what I’d said and the way I’d said it had really helped her.

So the advice in the book seems to be passing the practicality test so far. I would recommend it.

Center for Nonviolent Communication Website
Puddle Dancer Press Website

UPDATE: I should note that the one thing that kind of bugs me about NVC is the degree to which it seems to be identified with its creator, Marshall Rosenberg. There’s a degree of what seems like hero-worship or guru-hood about the NVC supporting materials/websites that gives me pause. On the other hand, the actual content of the book doesn’t give me that impression — the book is filled with personal anecdotes but the author doesn’t come across as thinking of himself as anything special. So that didn’t bother me reading the book. If I’d read the web sites before reading the book I might not have bothered because I’d have gotten the impression that [to paraphrase Jan Brady] it’s all about Marshall, Marshall, Marshall!

Microsoft: Our Bugs ARE our DRM

The Bryan-College Station Eagle > Associated Press Headlines says:

“Microsoft Corp. plans to severely curtail the ways in which people running pirated copies of its dominant Windows operating system can receive software updates, including security fixes.”

On the one hand, this is completely irresponsible because Microsoft’s security flaws, as exploited by worms and viruses, are dangerous and costly and waste untold internet resources every day.

On the other hand, you have to admire the creativity involved — now, Microsoft’s bug-ridden crapware is its own “DRM”! It’s like shareware which cripples itself if you don’t pay, but it’s pre-crippled at the factory!

And All the Children are Above Average

Imagine a place where everybody’s a brilliant scientist. I mean, Feynman, Einstein, Bohr, Hawking kind of brilliant. But nobody knows that, because they don’t know about the outside world, where people aren’t all brilliant scientists. Because of this, they consider only the top 1% of their population to be at all intelligent; most of the brilliant scientist folk don’t even bother doing science because they’re not really smart like the uberbrilliant folk. Say, they have an IQ of only 195 instead of 220 or whatever, so they flip burgers for a living. It’s a gigantic waste, but they don’t know any better. They don’t know the absolute value of their world of geniuses, just the relative value. So most of their people never bother using their scientific abilities.

There’s another place where everybody’s a genius musician or composer. Everybody there is a Bach, Mozart, Haydn, or a Hendrix, Lennon, Stevie Ray Vaughn, or a Louis Armstrong, or Muddy Waters, or a Yo-Yo-Ma, or whatever. They’re all musical geniuses, every one of them. But because they don’t know about the outside world where people aren’t all musical geniuses, only the top 1% of them (by some measure or other) are considered actually “talented” — perhaps some forms of musical genius aren’t even respected at all in this world — and most of these people never pick up an instrument at all, or when they do, they’re ashamed of their work and think it’s pedestrian, amateur crap. Because they’re just average or sub-average people, in their world. The absolute value of their musical ability does not occur to them; they can only see the relative value. And despite the fact that the worst of them is still a world-class musician to us, their musical ability is the object of derision in that place.

Repeat this scenario in as many fields as your imagination can supply. A world of Mother Teresas. A world of Bill Gates’s. Whatever.

That’s the actual world we’re living in, I think. I think that our civilization is suffering terribly from an obsession on people’s relative value to the expense of their absolute value — grading on a curve. It’s scarcity-based economics applied to human beings.

I have come to realize working day to day in a moderately difficult field like programming that 95% of the skills you need as a programmer are skills you would need as a fry cook or a house cleaner or anything else. They’re the human skills of perception and problem solving and response to unexpected situations and judgment of importance and all that. The things we’ve all been doing forever. There is an additional 5% which consists of having learned a bunch of unusual technical knowledge, but it’s not the most important 5%.

Being human, having a normal, ordinary, day to day, functioning human mind, is a huge thing. It is genius, in an absolute sense. An ordinary everyday human who can think is capable of incredible things, and most of those humans are artificially prevented from doing most of what they are capable of because in any given field they can see someone more capable and therefore they judge their own absolute genius as relatively worthless.

The further hell of it is, those standards are not only unfair because they’re merely relative and ignore absolute value, they are also arbitrary and context-dependent. Despite the pretensions of IQ and other such curves to grade on, there is no real absolute measure of competence, ability, value, or the like. Any standard by which you measure how much something is “worthy” is going to have limitations and ignore other ways to be worthy or have value. So besides the relative/absolute problem, we have the sheer arbitrariness of the standards by which relative and absolute value are judged.

The fact is, our civilization hasn’t really learned that people are valuable just as people, without being on the end of this curve or that, and have a lot to contribute individually. We make a lot of noise about “everybody being special/valuable” but we don’t act that way; we act as if you only matter if you’re on the far end of some arbitrary bell curve. And we are so much the poorer for it. There are so many things that everyone could contribute to the world that they are afraid to becaue they’re not “good enough.”

Just Asking

Sometimes people just ask for things. You can grant them or deny them. There is no punishment if you deny them, besides your knowledge that you have denied someone something they asked for. And no reward if you grant them, besides your knowledge that you have granted something someone wanted, and their thanks.

More often people ask for things as a polite way of telling you to do something, with consequences if you refuse. “No smoking please” is not just asking. They’ll kick you out if you smoke. Maybe they’ll call the cops.

Because of these “loaded requests” people sometimes react very strongly to actual “just asking” requests. Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation and the GNU project, much of which is customarily bundled with the Linux kernel, asks you to call the resulting system GNU/Linux, not Linux. He also asks you to stop using proprietary software, and to release any software you write under a Free Software license. He won’t do anything to you if you don’t, except perhaps refuse to do things he is under no obligation to anyway, like speak at your club meeting. He just asks you to do these things because he thinks they are the right thing to do.

People get very, very bent out of shape at him for asking to do these things. As if he’s done something terrible by asking people to do things he thinks they should do. I think that’s because actual requests, without an implied threat, are so rare these days that people react to them as if they did carry an implied threat. As if Stallman were going to go kick their butts if they refused to call it GNU/Linux.

Here’s a similar request: Kasper asks that you not use the Typo3 CMS system for what he would consider “anti-Christian” purposes. He won’t stop you if you do. It’s still standard GPL-licensed software, free for anyone to use. He’s just asking you not to use it in certain ways, and he’s even asking you to use your own judgment as to whether you’re using it in the ways he wouldn’t want. This was thought remarkable enough that it was blogged at Metafilter and generated a lot of commentary, where a lot of people seemed to have a hard time understanding the difference between “just asking” and “requiring by license terms potentially enforceable by lawsuit.” One person even specifically described such a specifically unenforceable and unenforced request as “coercive.” That’s like, the opposite of what “coercive” actually means. Another described him as “attempting to control what I do” and went on to say “Yeah, it’s just request. But it’s narrow minded request and this sort of crap from any religion shouldn’t be tolerated.” These reactions didn’t all seem to reflect failure to notice the distinction between asking someone to do something and forcing them to do it; they often seemed to reflect a belief that asking someone to do something wasforcing them to do it.

There’s a very strange discomfort with “just asking.” People react as if they’ve been forced, and feel as if they’ve been forced, even if they specifically have not.

This fascinates me.

A final quote — this is one of the most interesting quotes from Richard Stallman ever. I feel it explains a lot.

JA: Are you optimistic about this?

Richard Stallman: I don’t know. I am a pessimist by nature. Many people can only keep on fighting when they expect to win. I’m not like that, I always expect to lose. I fight anyway, and sometimes I win.

From the Kerneltrap interview.