Recently, I received a question from a student about the compatibility of Nonviolent Communication (NVC) with Christianity given that the NVC worldview speaks of a world beyond right and wrong, and this person’s understanding of Christianity is rooted in those very notions.
Although I have often received and addressed similar questions, this time, because the focus was so squarely on Christianity, and I am neither Christian nor a theist, I chose to engage with others: fellow NVC trainers and friends. Thirty something emails on the topic later, this quest culminated in a conversation with my friend Nichola Torbett, Founder of Seminary of the Street, with whom I often have deep discussions about theology. With all this help, I am now both ready to respond to the question I was asked, and ready to share here some specific discoveries Nichola and I made today, informed, also, by what I learned from others.
Love and Coercion
Desmond Tutu and Dr. Paul Farmer
The first piece that struck me in talking with Nichola was her comment that the ultimate purpose of everything in Christianity was to increase the capacity to love. According to her, Jesus was quite aware that love cannot be coerced; it needs to be allowed to rise in order to achieve the state that St Irenaeus named in the 3rd century: “The glory of God is a person fully alive.” Clearly, though, the Bible, both the original Hebrew and the additional Christian scriptures, has many instances of specific human phenomena that are said to be wrong, and by extension punishable (punishment being a clear instance of coercion). How, then, are we to reconcile them with the fundamental notion of cultivating love in a non-coercive way?
Of course none of us know what Jesus exactly meant or even said. Still, a way of making sense of it emerged in our conversation. Could we look at the list of injunctions in the Bible as a draft of a blueprint for actions that, if taken consistently, would result in a growing capacity for love? It appears that Jesus may have meant at least some things this way, because he spoke of not taking what he says literally.
Another Jew also addressed this kind of dilemma. I am speaking of the medieval rabbi and philosopher known to the world as Maimonides (not his actual name, though derived from it). In his book Guide for the Perplexed, he speaks of the commandments that every observant Jew follows as a path to human evolution towards the highest human potential, which, for him was embodied by Moses. I read the passage repeatedly when I first encountered it, finding it hard to believe my eyes, and there it was. Maimonides said, in no uncertain terms, that those who attain a certain level of development do not need the commandments any longer. Why then do they keep them anyway? Because of humility, and as an act of leadership and guidance to others.
While Maimonides side-stepped the question of whether or not the words of the Bible are to be followed literally, Michael Lerner, in Jewish Renewal: A Path to Healing and Transformation, speaks of how, in each generation, we are asked to go back to our scriptures, whatever our religion might be, and reexamine what is, truly, the voice of God, and what are the distortions of that voice brought about by the cumulative effect of cruelty and suffering over millennia. Of course, this way of looking at things relies on the assumption that the Bible, like all other religious texts, was written by humans to capture their understanding of the voice of God. It is the humans who wrote and then interpreted the scriptures over the generations that are affected by what exists in their particular time and place. Perhaps notions of right and wrong were introduced because this is how humans at the time understood the path.Within this frame, if we see the Bible’s injunctions as a human creation, a proposal for how to walk the path of love, then they surely could serve as guidelines for self-selection, a way to attract the people for whom that particular path is a fitting way of walking towards love, while others may follow other paths.
As a non-practicing Jew, for example, I often find deep affinity with Jesus the revolutionary Jew who questioned everything, a very common Jewish practice throughout the generations before and since him, aiming to restore the foundational values of Judaism, to wake up his fellow Jews to what matters most: love, care for others, creating systems based on justice, and faith in possibility. I can receive sustenance from who I imagine him to be without in any way being drawn to the specific practices and beliefs that have become part of Christianity.
And what about the student? There is no question that the path of Christianity as she understands it speaks deeply to her, and I can see how much it supports her in being able to love more fully. Along with the question, she also shared with me that she sees NVC as being supportive of her being able to live the tenets of Christianity. In this, she is united with people of many religions who have expressed similar sentiments, saying that NVC gives practical form to their religious principles. The only question is whether she needs to hold her Christian principles as “right” or whether there can be a different way.
NVC and Notions of Right and Wrong
Why would anyone want to leave behind notions of right and wrong when they exist in most versions of most religions as well as in other moral systems? Isn’t it a core human faculty to distinguish between right and wrong, good and evil?
Maimonides on a New Israeli Shekel
I come back to Maimonides one more time. In his same book, he poses this question, which I summarize and paraphrase: how is it that Adam and Eve got rewarded for the transgression of eating the forbidden fruit by being given this faculty of knowing good from evil? His answer, which I learned about first when I was fifteen, and which continues to delight me, is that it is not a reward to be preoccupied with right and wrong, good and evil. Maimonides was an Aristotelian, and was partly responsible for reintroducing Christian Europe to Aristotelian thought, which he received from the Arabs in Spain and passed on to none other than Thomas Aquinas. Within that context, his way of explaining why it wasn’t a reward is perhaps not surprising. Simply put, he argued that Adam and Eve lost a faculty rather than gained one: “he was punished by the loss of part of that intellectual faculty which he had previously possessed. He therefore transgressed a command with which he had been charged on the score of his reason [the realm of true and false]; and having obtained a knowledge of the apparent truths [the realm of good and evil], he was wholly absorbed in the study of what is proper and what improper.” This is one way of understanding what the fall from paradise means, according to Maimonides: aiming to decide what is right and what is wrong is stepping into the domain of God, not of humans, and in doing so we lost our actual paradise of being at one with the natural order of things.
This difference has everything to do with NVC, because one of the core practices of NVC is the capacity to distinguish observations, which are matters of truth and falsity, from interpretations and judgments, which are matters of good and evil, right and wrong.
One of my colleagues, James Prieto, is an NVC trainer who has explored this very idea about the tree of knowledge of good and evil, even without knowing about Maimonides. He concluded that “the goal is to figure out how to return to the Garden of Eden – i.e. to transcend our propensity to judge. What NVC brings to the table, indeed, is just that – through empathy and honesty we are able to get to the ‘fully alive’ state that St. Iranaeus spoke of, and Jesus was quoted as saying in John 10:10 “I have come so that they may have life to the full.” James so loved this story, that he actually wrote a book about this called The Joy of Compassionate Connecting: The Way of Christ through Nonviolent Communication.
Another NVC trainer colleague, Alex Censor, goes even further with the same story. While discussing these issues with his wife and friend Meera, they came to a startling conclusion which he described thus: “There’s a practical metaphorical alert in there for us, which we have verified in our own lives. The moment I am in the consciousness of judgment of you as wrong/evil … I am instantly ‘out of paradise’ …. kicked out of the garden of Eden so-to-speak.”
Some people end up believing that the NVC worldview says that judgments are wrong. I see it very differently. What studying NVC has gotten me clear about, and powerfully so, is that whenever I speak the language of right and wrong, I step out of what I have the authority to speak about with knowledge, and, instead, assume the position of an all-knowing entity (i.e. God!). In the most radical way, for me, I believe we simply cannot know if anything is right or wrong – we can only truly know what works and what doesn’t for us. There may be great and enormous pain and harm that is of such big proportion that we would feel pulled to call it wrong so as to invoke an authority larger than our own, to be able to rally a community, even the world at large, to stand by us.
Still, from where I stand, the only position of full integrity that I can have is that the only thing we can know for sure is our own experience, perspective, needs, desires, preferences, feelings, and interpretations of reality. For as long as we stay within our sphere of authority, no one can disagree with us, although they are always free to not like what we say or do, as that is within their sphere of authority.
Even the notion of sin, so central to Christianity, can be reframed outside the right/wrong paradigm. The origin of the word in Hebrew literally means “missing the mark.” James Prieto, my NVC colleague I mentioned earlier, provides what I see as an ingenious way to map “sin” into the NVC focus on needs. According to him, “missing the mark” occurs anytime that any of us meet our needs at the expense of others, or meet someone else’s needs at the expense of ours, or even meet some of our needs at the expense of other needs. Defining sin this way provides a way out of relying on an external authority about what is right or wrong. Instead, we can rely, once again, on our own authority, our internal compass for living, which is to be found in our hearts, which, as James puts it, “bear the image of God.”
And what happens when we step outside our authority and begin to assert what is right and what is wrong? We end up interfering with the possibility of human understanding, connection, and collaboration. Instead, we sow the seeds of war, in that others are only invited to agree or disagree. As far as I can tell, humans have been on the path of trying to convince everyone of their individual and collective version of what is right and what is wrong for about 10,000 years, and we have not gotten any closer together as a result. I simply don’t believe that it’s possible to come together on the basis of all of us agreeing to one version of what is right and what is wrong. Even the one that comes closest to universal agreement, the commandment not to kill, is not actually universal, as there are many groups, including modern “democratic” societies, that make it entirely OK to kill certain people or groups.
I do believe, however, that it is possible to bring all of us together on the basis of aiming to attend to as many needs as possible, of as many entities as possible, as often as possible. Love, oneness, and caring for everyone’s needs is just as core to multiple religious traditions as are notions of right and wrong. Perhaps we might finally be able, in our explosive capacity to be connected electronically, to find a way to live out this all-encompassing love?
Who Then Matters?
When we got to this part of the conversation, Nichola brought up the question of whether or not there is any room for the notion of evil in the framework we were settling into. That’s when things got particularly satisfying, as I found a way to provide an NVC twist to this notion. Instead of seeing “evil” as the opposite of “good”, I saw, instead, a spectrum running from “love” to “evil”, which spans our human capacity to care about needs. On the side of “love” is the human capacity, even longing, to be in a state of love of all, a state of oneness in which everyone matters, a fully open heart. All the way on the other end of the spectrum, what we tend to call “evil” may simply be the most horrible state we can be in, when absolutely nothing matters, not us, not anyone else, not life itself. This is the state of utter disconnection, complete and total reactivity, in which harm is simply not seen as such. All is possible, in the opposite direction, as nothing unites us with anything else, and our actions themselves don’t matter.
As I see it, any step we take in the direction of assigning a value of rightness or wrongness to anyone’s acts, tends to push us towards less care for this person, less concern for attending to their needs, as they are seen as less deserving. This helps explain why we are then willing to inflict punishment on people, which, to me, has always seemed fantastical, especially in contexts where love is supposed to predominate, between friends and within families, especially towards children.
Before concluding I want to speak briefly of the vexing question of what we can do in relation to harm done. What is a way to respond when harm has been done that holds everyone with love, that invites responsibility, that reduces the chances of continuing harm being done, that restores the shattered trust in a community or the world, that provides opportunities for those whose actions have harmed others to be able to retain their own dignity while recognizing the effect of their actions? This is a topic I plan to revisit in the future, because the picture of the world I want to create cannot be complete without recognizing that harm does happen, no matter how well we design our structures.
Perhaps some things are wrong; I just cannot know which they are. I have adopted the path of humility and not knowing. Whether or not I like what someone is doing, even when they have harmed what is dear to me, I know that I want to maintain caring for them. I want to keep my own heart open, widely open, as often as I possibly can, to move towards paradise, the Garden of Eden I see so clearly as possible in our future.
Image credits. Top: “Cefalu Christus Pantokrator cropped” Photo by Andreas Wahra, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0. Middle: Archbishop Emeritus Desmond M. Tutu and Paul Farmer, Skoll World Forum, 2011, Flickr, CC BY 2.0. Middle lower: from the NSP website. Bottom: “One NIS Rambam” by Pc84. Wikimedia Commons, public domain.
While this is beautifully written and extremely thoughtful, it misses the entire prophetic tradition of Judaism and Jesus as far as I can tell. It also presumes that we cannot see moral harm in, for example, racial segregation or that if we can we have no business calling it wrong. We human beings may not be God but we have come up with some moral values that follow the notion of the glory of God being a human being fully alive, such as the idea that human well-being should be a central human goal and that individual, cultural, and institutional practices that damage well-being, that keep people from being fully alive, are, yes, wrong. So, extreme economic inequality that leaves many in poverty? Wrong. Racism? Wrong. Homophobia that leaves many people able to be fired at will from their jobs for no reason other than their sexuality, and that leaves us vulnerable to being beaten up on the street? Wrong. To not call those things wrong is not to be neutral and love everyone equally; it is to side with oppressors, those who cause harm, to say that there is no problem with these harmful practices since they are merely carried out to meet legitimate human needs or respond to legitimate human feelings (since human needs and feelings are always legitimate – a point with which I do agree).
I take seriously the concern that making some people wrong means valuing them less and treating them less well. That doesn’t work either and is no solution. Rather, we need to think in terms of consequences rather than intentions, systems rather than individuals. Or rather, we need to think in terms of individuals participating in larger systems that cause harm. I am a white person who does anti-racist education and I fully accept the reality that I have privilege and power by virtue of being white that almost no people of color have (and even Oprah can be locked out of a jewelry store because the clerk thinks she can’t possibly be wealthy enough to buy any of their goods). My having privilege and power has nothing to do with my intentions, which are good. They have to do with the social structure in which we live. I ought not to be thought less of as a human being because I am white and benefit from white privilege and power. But it is my moral responsibility to work against racism simply because it harms and frequently kills people of color (and because it traps white people in fear, defensiveness, and immobilized guilt). I cannot work against racism, or homophobia or any other form of inequality for that matter, if I cannot call it wrong on the basis of its consequences.
I would love to see a world where the individual, psychological, and spiritual priorities of NVC can be well-blended with the collective, social, and consequence-driven priorities of social justice movements. I don’t know what that would look like and it may not be easy to develop. But it is a good goal. I look forward to seeing what emerges over time.
I think your post illustrates exactly the problem with the “right/wrong as absolutes” approach. It always amounts to an individual wanting to impose their values on everyone. There are people who see racial segregation as not only right but as commanded by God. So if they also believe that right/wrong as they see it is absolute – we come full circle to whose right/wrong is right. There is no definitive answer to that question.
pov, by your argument lynching is not definitively wrong. Racial segregation is not definitively wrong. Gaybashing is not definitively wrong. Rape is not definitively wrong. Do you in fact believe that yourself? If you genuinely believe that – if harming people is not morally wrong and treating people well is not morally right – then perhaps our starting assumptions are so wildly different that we can’t have a productive conversation. But that would make me sad. I don’t see this as trying to impose my individual values (as though no one else held them) on other people. I see this as asking for a genuinely ethical, moral conversation about what is right and wrong and why. And sometimes, as Dr. King did, making a stand for what is right even though plenty of other people thought it wrong. Avoiding the question may lead to an individualistic focus that in turn facilitates deep personal growth in a rather private way but it does not get us out in the world making a difference for people who suffer because other people treat them badly. But if that’s not your priority, I honor our differences and wish you well.
Hi Amanda and pov,
I regret how long it’s taken me to find the moment and space to respond.
The issues we are dealing with here are, to my mind, some of the most central considerations about what it means to be human and how we can make sense of a world in which the levels of suffering are so beyond comprehension.
The deepest question for me here, based on the passionate plea I hear from Amanda, and which I share, is this: must it take me calling things wrong in order to work to transform them?
For myself, the answer is a resolute no. I have come to believe, and for the most part have integrated this belief into how I truly respond to things, that the felt sense I have of what matters to me and the largest vision of what I want to see in the world are enough to galvanize me into all the work I am doing.
Like you, I am aware of the systems within which we live, and, specifically the system of racial privilege. Like you, I see a total difference between the structural privilege I have and my intentions. It gets a bit different because I am an adult immigrant into this country, though that different is incidental in terms of the privilege itself. It only matters in the sense that I am less likely than white people who grew up in this country to feel guilt and shame, to be defensive, or to be oblivious to my privilege.
I have and continue to take action to support transformation of these structures, something I feel quite helpless about achieving. I feel much more effectiveness in terms of being able to speak with white people about privilege, and in terms of forging alliances with people of color to reflect on how to be most forward moving in our frameworks and actions. It’s small, and it’s steady and growing.
And I do all this without calling anything wrong. I am heartbroken. Sometimes I have a hard time breathing fully when I hear of what is happening. Sometimes the strain of seeing the humanity of the person who did certain things is extremely demanding. And, still, I don’t find the frame of “wrong” being conducive to transformation of any kind. I find it either creates alliances that are based on some separation from some “them”, or it creates alienation and separation from someone who doesn’t agree with me.
This is what I see pov trying to point out, though I have no way of knowing, since I am not pov… Not that s/he is OK with rape, lynching, murder. Only that calling it wrong when others call it right continues the cycle.
I have never heard of a war that wasn’t justified by those who waged it as being self-defense. That gives me pause.
In summary, as I see it, this is a case of twice over being in an either/or frame. One is that things are either right or they are wrong; as if saying that if I don’t call something wrong it means I am somehow condoning it.
The second layer that I see is that one either calls something wrong, or one is bound to only engage in individual, personal growth within a bubble of privilege.
On both counts, I am neither.
I hope this makes sense, and am happy to continue to engage if this is still of interest. I am grateful for all layers on this particular topic, which, again, I see as central to even the very survival of our species. My own tragic sense is that we’ve been killing each other much more, and destroying the planet much more, since we’ve started to assign right and wrong values to things.
I am not anticipating that we will come to an agreement. What I want, only, is to have the perspective of “neither” be on the table.