Hammers. Anvils. Heat. And the Wedge
Right now as riots crisscross the United States there is a tendency for some people to decry acts of looting and open expressions of anger as somehow illegitimate--or that they cannot possibly be part of a path that forges a better society. And, while I personally abhor violence, to say that there is no place for violence in social change ignores history.
If you want to forge metal, you need three things: heat, a hammer and an anvil. The four men pictured above are the hammers and anvils of social change. We like to credit Martin Luther King with the advances of the civil rights movement. But who would his message have rang as clear without riots across the country? Would he have resonated with the masses if Malcolm X wasn’t offering a more violent alternative?
In India we like to credit Gandhi’s nonviolent movement for freeing South Asia from the bonds of colonial rule. We talk about how he salt-marched to the sea, tolerated British jails and after all that nonviolent action the British just left. Well, everyone from India knows that the change wasn’t so easy. The guy with the hat in the picture above is Bhagat Singh, a freedom fighter who killed a British officer and threw a bomb into the legislature. There were other armed insurrections across the British Raj that put the British into an impossible situation. On one hand they had to fight an insurgency, while on the other, the rest of the world saw them putting Gandhi in jail. In 1947, the British left India.
In both cases social change happened only because of the contrast between violence and the nonviolent alternative. We may valorize the people who turn the other cheek. But we should not forget that it was the contrast between the two different approaches that ultimately altered the political and social landscapes.
Since I released The Wedge many people have asked me about how the concept operates on the societal level. After all, one of the main themes of the book is that consciousness operates at different levels as a superorganism--that the sum of human actions organizes systems that have their own rules. Seen from this perspective both COVID and the riots across America are the stresses that we need to learn to respond to. They test our social nervous system precisely because they offer a threat that could destabilize the fundamental structure of society. It’s the social equivalent of a threat of death. At the same time, these macro level threats demand some sort of psychological or physical response.
In the last few decades there have been thousands of non-violent protests against police brutality in America. People have held picket signs and shouted into the halls of power. But not much has changed. More people have died by the bullets and under the knees of murderous cops. Most of those officers never saw a day of jail time. The situation undermines the rule of law and makes the job so much more difficult for the good officers who entered law enforcement for the most noble reasons. But in the absence of a political mechanism that addresses the injustice, it is no surprise in the least that we have violence on our streets.
The question now is whether this conflagration of protest and violence will congeal into the right mix of hammer, heat and anvil. If there’s too much violence we end up in revolution--in a place where opportunists turn the message to whatever direction suits them the best. We saw this most recently in the Arab Spring which grew out of liberal ideals and descended into something much more violent and cynical. If there is only non-violence then the state has no reason to pay attention, and the situation is more reminiscent of the plight of the Tibetan people living in exile--the Dalai Lama is a charismatic leader with a message of peace that resonates around the globe, but there’s no pressure internally in China to hammer out change. And finally, if there is only heat--protests around the country, broken windows and anger all around--what could have been a movement will eventually cool off and we will return to the status quo.