I spent part of my Thanksgiving break going through Gene Sharp’s new book, Sharp’s Dictionary of Power and Struggle: Language of Civil Resistance in Conflicts. As I indicated in an earlier post, it’s a necessary book, for students and teachers alike, because it organizes the terminology and a few of the recent events that surround the field of nonviolence and civil resistance. Some of the entries seem obvious, but all of them are useful, if only because they are given a place of residence between two covers. We need more of these kinds of books as nonviolence matures, both as a subject and as a practice.
I said in that earlier post that I would mention an entry or two that caught my eye. Ever heard of “Collective Disappearance?” Here’s how Sharp defines it:
The severance of all social contact with the opponents by the population of a small area, such as a village. They remain hidden somewhere within the territory. Hiding distinguishes this method of social noncooperation from protest emigration. Not to be confused with the practice of extremely repressive governments physically “disappearing” resisters and their supporters.
I was drawn to this idea because I believe there are various ways that all of us can disappear whenever we find it helpful or necessary to do so, withdrawing our support from the mental habits as well as from the social and governmental practices that we don’t support. Or that are actively harming us. When I read Sharp’s definition, I thought about the Buddhist concept of renunciation, a distant and powerful cousin of “collective disappearance.”
Here’s what I mean. Renunciation doesn’t ask that we deny ourselves the vices we’d secretly love to indulge. Denial won’t last, and if it does, frustration rises as a result of it. Instead, we need to understand the abusive nature of the bad habits that manage our days (hatred, anger, jealousy, pride, greed, even nationalism and ideology—things like that), and then determine the nature of our own complicity with these corrosive habits. (And complicity, remember, might amount to a silent tolerance of them.) But once we’ve gotten some clarity about our involvement with these habits, we will see that they cause great pain both for ourselves and for others.
At this point, we have some new information, and with it, we’ll find it easier to renounce these habits because we see clearly that they are destroying us by limiting our vision, by compromising our vast potential for happiness. And we will take steps to remedy the problem; we will renounce these habits not because we think we ought to renounce them, but because we see that they are making our lives harder than they need to be—this is real renunciation.
Renunciation does not happen because we blindly follow ordained codes of behavior or dogmatic prohibitions, but because we wake up to the nature of our own attachment to and support of abusive practices. This will come as a shock to us, but the shock will give us the urgent energy we need to make the changes we’ve envisioned. These changes will be personal in nature, but they will have a political implication. Whether the political implication becomes obvious or not we don’t always know, but the action is the same: we understand the destructive nature of a specific habit of thought, and then take the necessary steps to break it.
Still, the outward change, the socio-political change, that might be visible to our friends has been occasioned by the inner change, the spiritual force of renunciation. Which, in Sharp’s phrase, amounts to a kind of “collective disappearance” from these oppressive forces, whether they are personal or, as Sharp indicates, political.
