Punishment and Reward

by Miki Kashtan

I have been carrying a vivid memory with me for over 50 years. In it, my father is chasing me around the little circle of dining area, kitchen, corridor, and living room that existed in our apartment. In my memory, this has happened already, to me and to my older sister. I don’t know, in actuality, if it was a one-time event or recurring. As I am running away from him, I suddenly realize there is just no way I can manage to escape. He is bigger, and faster, and I am small, not as strong. Sooner or later he will catch up with me. I stop, crushed by the futility of the effort, and turn around to accept the inevitable slap in my face I know is coming. I stand in my small body facing him as he is coming my way. I close my eyes as tightly as I can, contracting the muscles around them, raise my face in his direction, and wait. The burning sensation of that slap is still imprinted on my cheek. More significant by far is the impossibility, to this day, of having a visceral understanding of how a grown man could look at his five year old daughter, see her stand the way I remember me standing, and still deliver the slap. What could possibly make it appear to be the right thing to do?

I have no awareness of what the “transgression” was that led to this event. I do know that making me submit to his will was a major project for my father. As it is for so many parents in relation to so many children.

Some Thoughts on Good and Evil

by Miki Kashtan

Seriously, don't you wonder if anything can be written about this topic that hasn't already been said many times over? I did, too, until I encountered Nonviolent Communication while I was in graduate school pursuing a doctoral degree in sociology. I wasn't studying good and evil, at least I didn't think I was. I had no idea, at the time, that my interest in the relationship between reason and emotion was intertwined with the deepest and most perennial questions of human nature, hence with matters of good and evil which I had set aside for years.
 

I never liked the Medieval belief that human beings are innately evil, bad, or sinful, because I intuitively couldn't fathom why and how nature would give rise to sinful creatures. I also didn't ever find more satisfaction in the modern notions of "evil" such as the "selfish gene" evolutionary theory or the Freudian notions of an innate aggressive drive. Proponents of all such theories are hard-pressed to explain acts of true kindness, especially in the face of potential consequences, such as those who saved Jews during the Holocaust at risk to their own lives.

Like most people who balk at theories of sin, the only alternative I could come up with was to imagine human beings as being innately good. That, too, didn't fit the reality I saw. As a Jew growing up in Israel, the Holocaust was simply too vivid a memory, presenting too much evidence to the contrary to dismiss. I was left with too many unanswered questions whichever way I looked at the issues.

Talking about Bullying

by Miki Kashtan

When I said “yes” to giving a keynote speech about bullying at a community conference put together by the Albany Unified School District in CA, I knew I could count on a global network of Nonviolent Communication trainers to help me. The biggest support I received was a deeply moving story about Zeke, a 16-year-old boy, member of the KKK, who was met with such empathy that he could recognize that his membership was an attempt to have connection with his father. Being understood as deeply as he was by my colleague Catherine Cadden was a new experience for Zeke. He came up to her after the event and said: “You know, that was the first time I felt fear begin to leave my body. I’m actually relieved.” Zeke ended up leaving the KKK after taking a deeper look at his choices.

I titled my talk For the Benefit of all Children: A Compassionate Perspective on Bullying, and started it with Zeke’s story (click here to see the talk on Youtube). I could see and hear the shock in the room when I mentioned his affiliation. As the story unfolded, I sensed that people were trying on the idea, so foreign to our habitual sensibilities, of meeting a KKK member with empathy. Unless, of course, one is a KKK member, in which case meeting many other people with empathy would be equally shocking. By the end of the talk I had a sense that the audience and I had been on a journey together. We went from an individual responsibility for and a punitive response to bullying to a community-based sense of responsibility and a systemic approach based on preventive and restorative responses. Understanding violence as an expression of unmet needs invited the audience to consider the possibility that having everyone’s needs cared for and more of them met would likely result in significantly less violence. Whatever is leading a person to bullying would not be attended to by being told it’s wrong and bad to bully. Especially given the strong association of violence with shame, as James Gilligan so lovingly calls us to consider in his book Violence: Our Deadly Epidemic and Its Causes, punishment can only increase violence, because it leads to more shame.

I ended the talk with a vision of possibility. In this vision schools are structured in a way that maximizes children’s physical safety. When transgressions happen, both the child who bullied and the child who was bullied know they will be accepted and supported in finding reconnection.      The child who was bullied has hope that s/he can express her/his vulnerability and pain, and that it matters to the community. The child who bullies has support in finding other ways to get her/his needs met. The child who bullies also has hope that there is a place in the community for her/him. No one is ostracized. The community has a way to talk about behaviors that harm others without making the person who did the harming bad or wrong. The sense of a community caring for everyone is maintained even through hard times.

I have so much faith that in such a community fewer and fewer children will resort to violence, because they will have ample other avenues to meet their needs.

If the audience indeed went on a journey with me, I also went on a journey with them. Being a visionary for so many years I have gotten into a tragic habit of assuming that people will ridicule or oppose my vision. I believe I spoke this time without compromising my message and without alienating people, at least as far as I could tell through my interactions with the audience. To do so I had to muster enough trust and confidence to assume that people will join me on this journey, to counter my habitual assumption to the contrary. I walked from the place of being all alone in the world to a place of trusting that there is room for me in this world and in this community that invited me to speak. Like the person who bullies, or the one bullied, I want to trust my belonging. I can see now that the invisible expectation of not being heard, not having room, not finding commonality, may well be a self-fulfilling prophecy and make it harder for me to connect fully with others. I hope to be able to apply this lesson in every area of my life.

Nonviolence and Vulnerability

“Just as one must learn the art of killing in the training for violence, so one must learn the art of dying in the training for non-violence. Violence does not mean emancipation from fear, but discovering the means of combating the cause of fear. Non-violence, on the other hand, has no cause for fear… He who has not overcome all fear cannot practice ahimsa.” (Gandhi, All Men Are Brothers, 104)
Courage in the Face of Fear
This quote has been haunting me ever since I first discovered it some years ago. I think about it several times a week. I find it so intense, so fascinating, and at one and the same time inspiring and discouraging. I know that the practice of nonviolence – whether in the social activism context, or in daily life – requires tremendous courage. In moments of great challenge this statement sometimes helps me find the courage to face my fear and continue anyway. At other times, in moments of darkness, the continued existence of such basic fear in me becomes so disheartening. If after all these years of rigorous training and practice I am still so often paralyzed, what is the point of even trying to teach nonviolence?

Today, as I am sitting here to write this, I am also wondering: if nonviolence, ahimsa, is about love, is moving forward through the fear enough? Is it possible to act on pure love when we are afraid? Are there different kinds of courage, one protected one not? What exactly are we choosing when we embrace nonviolence – either as a path, or in a particular moment?

Facing the Risks of Embracing Nonviolence
Since 1996 my own path of nonviolence has been embracing vulnerability. I have been systematically undefending and unprotecting myself. My sustenance and inspiration for this path come from experiences that are very remote from my own life. Gandhi, and his willingness to put his life on the line with complete commitment to love, openness, respect for his opponents. Jesus, whose commitment, as filtered to me through generations of interpretations, was to loving no matter what. Martin Luther King and the many people who worked with him to train a cadre of young women and men ready to face anything to implement their vision of respect for all people. Even though my own practice never endangers my physical survival, the risks of social isolation, humiliation, and loss of respect are equally frightening for my emotional self. I choose to face the risks, more and more over time. I lean on these figures, images of love and courage, in the most literal way to help me walk through abysses that sometimes seem bigger than my individual capacity.

Not Knowing
I am not settled. I face my fear and walk on, risk the consequences, and learn to survive them. Does this mean I will be less afraid next time? Will the responses affect me less next time? If I am vulnerable – enough – will there eventually be fewer consequences, more openness to the vision I am bringing forth, to my own individual self, to my own human fallibility? If I survive enough times, will I find more ease in the midst of the fear to unprotect my heart? I mean, not just gather my strength and move forward, but most literally lay down the armor that surrounds my innermost part and walk forward, embracing life as it unfolds in that moment? What exactly am I hoping for? What exactly am I trying to teach?

More questions arise. What can I tell people about how to act when fear is all-consuming? What did the students in the Civil Rights Movement do? Did they feel fear when they were sitting at the lunch counters and being ridiculed and beaten up? Did they continue despite the fear, or was there some vision, conviction, love, unity or anything else that transcended the fear complete for the moment? What made it possible for them to do what they did that is missing in our time?

The very act of writing this is part of my practice. I am writing about being unsettled, unsure, struggling with questions I don’t know how to answer. This is not a clear, confident, upbeat, or optimistic message. So why share it? Because truth is what I am after, whatever its flavor. Because exposing my uncertainty may invite you, too, into self-acceptance, and the willingness to let down your guard. Because knowing you are not alone in your struggle may just be what you need to keep going on your path. Because breaking down the isolation we live in may well be vital for deepening our collective exploration of how to face the challenges of our time and survive as a species.

by Miki Kashtan