Most talk about world peace bores me, and most anti-war activism strikes me as psychologically and historically naive. I’m not sure what’s worse — listening to the generals and politicians defend nuclear weapons or listening to generals and politicians being blamed for them. The roots of human aggression go so much deeper than the current debate suggests, and more mindless slogans are hardly the way to deal with the unconscious myths that have caused us to make war for centuries.
Nuclear Strategy and the Code of the Warrior, edited by Richard Grossinger and Lindy Hough, is a remarkable anthology that looks at war and peace in a fresh way. The excerpt reprinted here is a discussion on “The Warrior and the Militarist.”
Highly recommended, this unusual book also contains essays by Freeman Dyson and Thomas Powers on nuclear strategy and diplomacy, Charles Ponce on the love of war, feminist writer Charlene Spretnak on the male aspects of war, the final act of Arch Obler’s play Night of the Auk, and many other readable and often haunting poems, letters and memoirs. It’s available from North Atlantic Books, 2320 Blake Street, Berkeley, California, for $12.95 plus $1.25 postage.
— Ed.
When this anthology was planned in 1983, Lindy Hough wrote a brief descriptive paragraph and sent it to prospective contributors. The “request for work” emphasized the archetypal aspects of war and the role of the shadow in human conduct, but Hough added notes to each person contacted, emphasizing the aspect she thought he or she could best cover or on which they might already have work. The note to Gary Snyder asked him if he would be willing to expand on his public statements about the unprofessional behavior of the Western military and the failure of our society to produce true warriors. Snyder was interested in the topic but wary of contributing to “yet another” nuclear anthology that might add to the level of misunderstanding about the relationship between pacifism and atomic weapons. He indicated that he was not opposed to war per se and did not want to join an anthology which had an unexamined anti-war premise. Hough suggested that these issues might best be explored in an open forum with internal martial artists, Snyder accepted the invitation, and an after-dinner discussion was held the last day of March 1984, at 2320 Blake Street in Berkeley, the offices of North Atlantic Books.
The participants:
Bira Almeida — better known as Mestre Acordeon — is one of the few officially and truly recognized masters of capoeira. [Ed: Capoeira is a Brazilian martial arts dance.] He graduated in capoeira from the “Centro de Cultural Fisica Regional” of Brazil in 1959. This center was the famous school of Mestre Bimba (1889-1974), the patron of capoeira and its most respected master. Almeida is the founder of the World Capoeira Association (1979) and the author of the book Capoeira: A Brazilian Art Form (North Atlantic Books, 1982). He is also the founder of the “Grupo Folclorico da Bahia” (1966) which won three international folkloric festivals. Additionally, Almeida is a folklore researcher, a playwright, a song writer, a musician, and a film actor specializing in Afro-Brazilian themes. He is a native of Brazil.
Richard Strozzi-Heckler has a Ph.D. in psychology and a third-degree black belt in aikido. He is co-founder of the Lomi School in Mill Valley, California (1970). The Lomi School conducts workshops in mind/body awareness and trains therapists, educators, and health professionals through a blend of traditional eastern disciplines and modern psychological methods (including yoga, aikido, bodywork, gestalt, meditation, conscious movement, breath work, and communication skills). Heckler continues to teach at the Lomi School and is also in private practice. He is author of The Anatomy of Change (Shambhala Publications, 1984) and editor of a forthcoming aikido anthology from North Atlantic Books.
Karin Epperlein is a professional dancer, choreographer, actress, and teacher of t’ai chi ch’uan. A native of Munich, Germany, she has toured Europe, Israel, the United States, and South America in a number of productions. Recently, she has appeared in San Francisco in three productions of the International Theater. She is now working on video films and teaching t’ai chi ch’uan in Berkeley and San Francisco.
Martin Inn is the founder and director of the Inner Research Institute School of T’ai Chi Ch’uan, which moved from Maui to San Francisco in 1972. He is a native of Hawaii who began studying the martial arts at the age of fourteen. After graduating from college he continued his studies in Seattle and Hawaii, then travelled to Taiwan where he worked with several well-known t’ai chi ch’uan practitioners. Upon his return he founded the Inner Research Institute in order to teach the short form of the yang style of t’ai chi ch’uan. Since then he has taught throughout the United States, in Australia, and the Republic of China. With Benjamin Pang Jeng Lo, Robert Amacker, and Susan Foe, he is the co-translator and editor of The Essence of T’ai Chi Ch’uan: The Literary Tradition (North Atlantic Books, 1979) and, with Benjamin Pang Jeng Lo, the co-translator and editor of the forthcoming Thirteen Chapters on Push-Hands by Cheng Man-Ch’ing (North Atlantic Books, 1985).
Gary Snyder is a poet, linguist, lay ecologist, and practitioner of Rinzai Zen Buddhism, currently living in Nevada City, California. Some of his books of prose are: Earth House Hold (New Directions, 1969), The Old Ways (City Lights Books, 1977), and The Real Work (New Directions, 1980). A recent book of poetry, Axe Handles, was published by North Point Press in 1983.
Lindy Hough, co-editor of the anthology Nuclear Strategy and the Code of the Warrior and co-publisher of North Atlantic Books, is an editor, writer, and poet. Her books include The Sun in Cancer (North Atlantic Books, 1975), Outlands and Inlands (Truck Press, 1978), and a book of essays in progress, Love and Power: The Transformation of the Shadow in the Nuclear Age.
Richard Grossinger, co-editor of the anthology Nuclear Strategy and the Code of the Warrior and co-publisher of North Atlantic Books, is an anthropologist and the author of a number of prose books, most recently Planet Medicine: From Stone-Age Shamanism to Post-Industrial Healing (Doubleday, 1980; Shambhala Publications, 1982), The Night Sky: The Science and Anthropology of the Stars and Planets (Sierra Club Books, 1981), and Embryogenesis (Avon Books, forthcoming, 1985).
Snyder: I’ve been working in the peace movement in the last couple of years. I’ve been in touch with people in the FOR and War Resister’s League, and have a number of friends who still remember the pacifist years of World War II. A certain kind of pacifist language and mentality strongly influenced by Gandhi and the Quakers was already going around the time of the Korean War, but that got kind of washed away after Cuba. When Castro took over, the left began to flirt with violence; violence began to look attractive because Cuba was doing so well. It was romantic. We all know the history of the civil rights movement and how it rapidly slipped away from a kind of Gandhian nonviolent stance into more and more sort of hit and kick back, and then a frankly pro-violence left began to emerge in the United States. And that all goes downhill in the end, to the TV spectacle of the Symbionese Liberation Army being totally obliterated. The foolish bravado and moral poverty of a “terrorist left” in the U.S.A. has been thoroughly exposed. Now the revived peace movement — freeze and after — begins to invoke Gandhi again, which is excellent. But I have been feeling some discomfort about the renewed moral absolutism that comes with it. Gandhi’s stance was based on a profound personal inner experience. To talk, as some do, about “making a world without war” when we’d be lucky to have a world without nuclear weapons, is talking hearsay and utopian theory. We can’t just talk peace, we have to be peace, or it’s another kind of bravado. I’d like a world without war; but we’d all settle for a world without wars that kill everything. I would settle for a world in which it’s not possible to conduct more than a very ordinary, low-level war. The military scale we’re living with now is not only unpleasant; it’s unprofessional. It isn’t what a good military man even in the twentieth century would want. To say we want a world without violence is even more problematical. There is an eminent Buddhist priest in the United States who teaches Americans, who said not long ago: “There’s really no difference between a husband and a wife arguing and the United States and the Soviet Union threatening each other with a nuclear war. We must confront the violence in ourselves.” That’s a kind of non sequitur. It’s dealing with questions like this that got me going on this topic. I was thinking, if somebody wants to have a world totally without violence, they can work toward it, but let’s start with going back to muzzle-loading rifles.
Grossinger: Of course it’s an impossible goal. It can’t be reached, so the attempt to reach it has consequences independent of the goal, perhaps even conflicting with the stated goal. That’s the effect of all unattainable goals. The only thing wrong with absolutism is that the world cannot be altered in absolutist ways. No ideology can be imposed indefinitely without causing an eruption of its shadow, its opposite force. So an obsession with peace becomes an irresistible urge toward war. The peace movements of the world have admirable qualities, but I think even some of their strongest adherents are beginning to see that they are addressing the wrong questions. The psychologist Edward Whitmont deals with some of this in his recent book, The Return of the Goddess. Let me read you a bit from it:
Our rejection of greed and violence is at best half-hearted and of but limited value in controlling their destructive power. In fact, we have been extremely skillful in devising innumerable righteous justifications for our own violence. . . . The unpleasant fact is that the ego’s striving for permanence, and its rejection of the urge for violence, is opposed by the persistence of the Dark God (or demon, if you will) in the recesses of the psyche. Violence, the urge for the destruction of form and the inflicting of bodily harm and death, continue to exert a forceful, exciting, and invigorating attraction upon the ego. . . . To an increasing extent, violence nowadays is perpetrated indiscriminately and without cause against the young, the old, and in everyday ordinary situations. It seems to be unleashed neither in anger nor out of economic necessity, but purely for the intoxication of satisfying a sadistic power urge. . . . Aggression is indispensable for adequate ego functioning and for the capacity to love and to relate. Ares, the God of war and strife, and Eros, the God of love and desire, are twin brothers psychologically.
He goes on to say that because aggression cannot be cut out of the human psyche, we must create ritual outlets for it, celebrations of its gods, mystery rites for sublimating its forces. But in the modern world we simply pretend to be rational and good and in control of our emotions and fate, and the result is sterile, obsessive violence and inexplicable brutality.
One would like to think that in infinite spiritual time the lion will lie down with the lamb, and we too, and war will not so much be eliminated as fused into a new structure as something other, as another face of the same god, less overtly destructive. But this is not likely within any frame of time in which we can imagine existing ourselves or anything like us existing. And of course, other people say that war is inevitable, not only as an expression of aggression and the unconscious drives and necessities of our species but as a continuation of the struggle for survival within nature, the struggle in which our species arose. Of course you can accept the struggle between the lion and lamb but see war as a human invention.
Snyder: But you haven’t even defined war yet. You see, that’s the first problem, right there. People talk about war as though a game of Trobriand cricket or some New Guinea spear-shooting, or a bunch of Comanche and Cheyenne going out and counting coup on each other and killing one out of every fifteen, are just the same as a nuclear confrontation. We should have different words for these different scales of war. It would help clarify what we’re talking about.
Heckler: Jonathan Schell actually brought that out. War connotes a winner and a loser. If you talk about nuclear war, there’s a possibility there may not be a winner at all.
Snyder: Well, that’s post-nineteenth-century. In prior times, there were not total winners or losers either. Total war, waged for the purpose of bringing the opponent to their knees, unconditional surrender, was largely a World War II invention. In the eighteenth and nineteenth century wars, unconditional surrender was never what they called for. War was a way to drive people back to the bargaining table. It was, as Von Clausewitz said, an extension of diplomacy. In many European wars, there was never the intention of destroying the ideology or the territory or the population of the enemy.
Grossinger: And certainly in wars of primitive people there wasn’t that intention, at least the ones we’ve observed ethnographically — although one wonders about the validity of our fantasies of Stone Age tribes being destroyed by other Stone Age tribes.
Snyder: What fantasies are those?
Grossinger: Robert Ardrey, African Genesis, and all that — to pick a rather blatant and much-maligned example.
Snyder: Oh, all that stuff is very suspect. Ardrey doesn’t warrant more than a sentence in this conversation.
To talk, as some do, about “making a world without war” when we’d be lucky to have a world without nuclear weapons, is talking hearsay and utopian theory. We can’t just talk peace, we have to be peace, or it’s another kind of bravado. I’d like a world without war; but we’d all settle for a world without wars that kill everything.
Hough: In North American Indian wars, was there a sense of destroying the enemy totally?
Snyder: No. They were not genocidal.
Grossinger: Modern anthropology doesn’t seem to have found genocidal wars among native peoples.
Snyder: Of course there have been some genocidal events within civilized times. One of the very first acts of the new-formed Roman Republic was to “clean up” the tribal people to the north of Rome to the extent of virtually destroying them. But genocidal wars when they occur are the invention of civilization. Pre-civilized people don’t do that. They don’t have the resources for it; nor do they have the need for it.
Grossinger: In a sense, the Stone Age fantasy is simply a projection of twentieth-century myths back on an unknown situation.
Snyder: I’m not sure even what fantasy you’re talking about — something like the model of Cro-Magnon eliminating the Neanderthal?
Grossinger: That’s Ardrey’s image. I don’t agree with it because I think they’re both our ancestors, but a like event may have happened at another time in other circumstances, perhaps even regionally, without affecting major evolutionary trends.
Snyder: I believe that everybody carries Neanderthal genes. It was an intermarriage process. The Neanderthals were never eliminated. They were just intermarried with, interbred with totally.
Grossinger: However, the fantasy reoccurs in sociobiology and other theories of society and human speciation based on the genetic selection of territoriality and destructiveness. It comes to its natural and absurd consequence in the ideology behind the nuclear confrontation — the justification for such massive stockpiles of weapons. We partially absolve our blame and guilt by claiming that we are responding to the natural bellicosity and dark motivations of our species from the beginning. The Soviets come to represent the primal horde, reincarnated through Communism. We look at ourselves and see the same primal horde. Many of the nuclear strategists in fact argue that a “world without war” has been created by these terrible weapons because they frustrate the species’ natural inclination to fight to the death.
Snyder: That’s all very ahistorical.
Grossinger: We can talk in terms of history, but we can also talk about existing myths which have their own history of consciousness. These myths are believed by large numbers of educated people.
Snyder: The existing mythology is a combination of the things you just described, such as the assumption that we’re driven to the point that we’re at right now by “human nature,” which is a totally false assumption. Elements of human nature are in it, but we are not driven to it — any more than a twentieth-century industrial white civilization is the only logical outcome of history. It’s always the habit of people in whatever time or culture they’re in to think that they are the mainstream of historical evolution. The West’s own particular myth is combination of Social Darwinism and Christian millenarianism. One of the most dangerous things underlying this particular confrontation is an unconscious metaphysical will to have a final Armageddon happen because it’s the Millennium. That would resolve the Book of Revelation and cause the Kingdom of God to come.
Grossinger: We’ve even elected leaders who are confused on that point. We have a President who arrogantly not only expects Armageddon in his lifetime but imagines himself to have a fated role in it. Some people even think the Russians are our only hope for avoiding a nuclear confrontation because they don’t have to sell disarmament to a Bible Belt of people who are already making plans for the Kingdom of God. And furthermore, they must know they are staring across the guns at a country full of such fanatics, preaching love and spirituality in holocaust.
Snyder: Exactly. It’s a real post-Renaissance theme in Western history: that there’s going to be an ultimate confrontation and ultimate destruction. So we’re acting out Judeo-Christian metaphysics.
Grossinger: It appeared during the Sixties as the omens of the destruction of the Earth by Kohoutek the comet and volcanoes preceding earthquakes.
Snyder: California’s going to fall into the sea.
Grossinger: I don’t know that there’s anyone who is not at least a little bit superstitious.
Snyder: Well, there are linear superstitions and then there are cyclical superstitions. Those are linear superstitions. We happen to be in a culture that’s living in a linear time frame, so it has an end to it, a highly apocalyptic end at that. In a linear frame, every time you get two drought years people will say: we must be going into permanent drought! Or every time we get a few cold winters people say the Ice Age is coming. Whereas we know for a fact that in every century there will be two cold winters. Every thousand years there will be ten extraordinarily cold winters. That’s all within cycles.
Grossinger: And the other half of the people say that the greenhouse effect is taking over and the earth is heating up dangerously.
Heckler: I just want to go back to this idea of what you were saying, Gary, this idea of the myth. Let’s say this unconscious need for Apocalypse is what we’re moving toward, but what kind of need is this coming out of? It’s almost as though we’re trying to fulfill this prophecy of a light and dark force. Then once everything is destroyed there will be this kind of heaven on earth, a final supreme deity to grace the survivors. I ask myself, what’s missing then? What are we responding to? What’s the need for that? What is it we want and why don’t we have it without that kind of apocalyptic vision?
Snyder: Well, it’s from a very dualistic worldview. Christianity tried to kick out the Manichaean heresy long ago, but Manichaeanism is still deeply embedded in our world-view. For people who accept that apocalyptic vision, the world is flawed as it is, incomplete, or, more deeply, the presence of Satan and evil is pervasive. Christian fundamentalists are very sharp on this: Satan is in the world. And they don’t want to live in a world that has Satan in it. The Millennium or the Apocalypse destroys the power of Satan, and then it becomes the Kingdom of God. But to destroy the power of Satan, there must be a great purging, great purification, much destruction. The Book of Revelation describes in detail the great wars and conflagrations and waves of death that will sweep humanity. And then the meek shall inherit the earth. It becomes the Kingdom of God. So if people are in that world-view, this world as it is is not good enough for them. They don’t want to live in it the way it is. It’s not absolute reality; it has no divinity in it. Animals aren’t sacred. People aren’t sacred. Trees aren’t sacred. The world is just dirt. Antonin Artaud, when he went crazy near the end, expressed this quintessentially. He said, It’s shit, it’s shit; this is all shit. Matter is shit. And that’s a very strong element of one part of the Occidental world-view that helps fuel the unconscious acceptance of this apocalyptic confrontation and makes people kind of half inside their heart hope it will happen.
Grossinger: Is this what you mean when you say that the militarist is an unprofessional warrior?
Snyder: The nineteenth-century militarist is a professional working for his government. In terms of Von Clausewitz, his job is to extend diplomacy on the battlefield. His job is over when they say, that’s enough. We’ve gotten what we wanted, or we’ve had to give up a certain amount, but it’s over. He is concerned with doing a good job. He is not a warrior, but he’s a professional working for the state. If you go back another step in time, moving further away from the state, you arrive closer to the warrior — who is in some cases a class or caste figure or an initiatory figure: either he has been initiated or born into or trained into a class or caste who not only handles violence effectively and with restraint for the sake of the state, but might handle violence compassionately and carefully from a spiritual standpoint. And that’s where I think the term warrior begins to apply. And then if you move back further in history to some other cultures you’ll find that the way of the warrior is a way of spiritually maintaining and confronting violence and containing it within a sphere that doesn’t become true evil, but remains something manageable. You know more about this than I do. I’m just speaking from a certain amount of travel, reading, and thinking.
Almeida: I am not so sure that I know more about this subject than you. However, we certainly have a different approach on the issue. I got lost in your discussion of historical perspectives on war and warriors. My perspective is just that of a capoeirista. First of all, the term “warrior” has never been applied to a capoeira person and to call capoeira a martial art is somewhat forced and makes me uncomfortable. Let me explain. The origins of capoeira are obscure, making it difficult to determine how this art developed its current shape, a mixture of fight, dance, music and a way of life. Easily we can imply that it was used by the African slaves as an expression of freedom. However, this does not mean that capoeira was only a weapon used in actual fights. I believe that this freedom also can be considered the journey into a special state of mind that the capoeirista reaches through the practice of capoeira. We are discussing war at this moment and I cannot think in terms of war. Because of my background as a capoeirista, I only can think in terms of fight. I see no more similarity between “fight” and “war” than between a “fighter” and a “warrior” in the context that this term is generally used. A fight in the capoeira context is an important process of self-understanding because when one confronts a serious opponent one is also confronting oneself in a situation that uncovers weaknesses and strengths. I believe that the fight in this context is a step toward self-discovery and consequently toward a personal growth. This is an individual process that cannot be extended to a level of millions of people fighting with contemporary war artifacts, or to a massive extermination of human beings in a nuclear confrontation of nations.
Snyder: I like the term “fighting.” Let’s just say that fighting is not necessarily war. Fighting is not war.
I think that a nuclear war is also a comfortable kind of war. The person who is pressing the buttons does not suffer the fear of actual fighting. Certainly, there is a fear of retaliation, but it’s very different from the feelings that come during a personal confrontation.
Hough: And nuclear armaments don’t really seem to be fighting. They are very far away from individual human contact.
Almeida: That’s true. They’re annihilation and have nothing to do with the kind of fighting I was talking about.
Hough: In my book I continuously compare nuclear war and pornography in the sense that they’re both tremendously abstract forms. They’re far back from the real thing that spurs them. Pornography is about five steps away from a real relationship with a real person, and nuclear armaments are many steps from really contacting your enemy. They both seem developed in a time of abstracting yourself, the same kind of era that gives rise to the assembly line and massive bureaucracies.
Almeida: I think that a nuclear war is also a comfortable kind of war. The person who is pressing the buttons does not suffer the fear of actual fighting. Certainly, there is a fear of retaliation, but it’s very different from the feelings that come during a personal confrontation. Think about the time when weapons were spears, swords, and clubs. You see your opponent running down a hill with a sword in hand. You can only rely on your own skill to defeat the blows, or on your own legs to flee. One might think that because more lives are involved, this last situation is more fearful. From an ethical and moral point of view, it is more dramatic. However, it is not the same agony of a drowning person trying to swim in a turbulent sea of emotions, such as the eminent sense of danger, the frightful confrontation with pain, or the possibility of an amputation without anesthesia.
Snyder: It’s a perfect development for a white middle-class war — for people who don’t like to get sick and who don’t like dirt.
Hough: A war for businessmen.
Inn: It’s a kind of war that doesn’t take any kind of self-cultivation.
Snyder: It does have a lot of training, however.
Pornography is about five steps away from a real relationship with a real person, and nuclear armaments are many steps from really contacting your enemy. They both seem developed in a time of abstracting yourself, the same kind of era that gives rise to the assembly line and massive bureaucracies.
Hough: Yes, math and physics; the elite of the society are in ballistics, trajectory planning. It’s very attractive, very high-paying.
Inn: It’s all an external type of cultivation. It doesn’t cultivate the spirit.
Snyder: There’s a cultivation of a certain kind: going through the correct steps in the correct sequence. But it’s also like having a baby born in the hospital. You have experts fight your wars for you.
Almeida: The people that fought conventional wars in the past were a distinct part of the population, the warriors. The whole of society didn’t have to fight in them. There is no similarity with a nuclear war that makes no distinction between warriors and children. In spite of this great difference between nuclear and conventional war, both are organized fights the purpose of which goes beyond the personal growth of the fighter. Because of this, the validity of any kind of war is questionable. Bringing this point to a personal level of confrontation, I think that we also should question when Myamoto Musashi took up the sword and cut off the heads of fifty or sixty people in search of his own self-development.
Snyder: That was the code of that class that permitted that.
Almeida: I do not accept a code that allows killing for personal growth. How is it different from one that allows conventional war for economic reasons or a nuclear one to keep another country from becoming more powerful?
Snyder: I am trying to think about Musashi now. He started out as a very rough man, and actually violated the official Bushido code by being too violent, and then gradually came to control himself.
Hough: So some violence is okay, just not too much violence.
Snyder: Theoretically at least, Bushido holds that you don’t use violence unless you’ve exhausted other means — that you don’t draw the sword unless you’ve tried to argue your way out of it. It’s the last step. Theoretically at least, the Bushido code is a code of restraint. With the capacity for violence comes the responsibility for restraint. It’s like the Sikhs of the Punjab: you can’t draw your knife unless you’re serious. But the practice of Bushido was often abused and corrupt. Samurai were often swaggering bullies, or later, subsidized social parasites.
Heckler: One of the words I keep hearing behind all this is “dignity.” We talk about Bushido and the Japanese tradition, and we always say the word “do” which is a way. That means there’s an internal process. So my experience of combat comes both from being in the martial arts, and military training for a war in which one had to use muscles and sweat. But there was no dignity in this war. I’m talking about Vietnam now. A classical warrior could have dignity. I don’t even know if the warrior’s “war” is right or his killing is right, but there’s a sense that there is some way or do that could make the warrior more whole — the possibility of being connected to something larger than his individual ego or simply having a good technique or slaying somebody. There’s a historical tradition or context of being a warrior which gave one a feeling of being connected to something larger than individual self. The Vietnam War put people in the dirt, in the sweat; it had to do that. But there was no sense of dignity to it. It seems as though in this whole nuclear thing, it’s not only the dignity that’s gone but there’s not that use of muscle. Or like in capoeira when we come into the roda, and it’s two men, or two women, or a man and a woman, and you’re facing each other, and you don’t know what’s going to happen. And it’s the same thing in aikido. Even though you are confronting another person you understand that it’s really between you and you. And even if you lose externally, it’s still you and you internally. And even if you win, it’s still you and you. This refers to the words of Master Ueshiba, the founder of aikido, when he said, “The opponent is within you.” Whereas in the modern war you just have the lieutenant say: go out and do this, and you would look and you would think: that guy’s a jerk, I wouldn’t follow him around the block. And then there is the situation in the missile silos when they get the message to shoot the missile off, they have to back each other up. If one guy balks, the other guy pulls out a gun on him. There’s no sense of dignity or path in this. It seems so abstract and impersonal that one doesn’t have the opportunity to develop psychologically or spiritually.
I just came back from India and there was martial law because of an escalating conflict in the Punjab. I’m going through the airport, and my Swiss army knife was in my handbag. So the officer said to me, you can’t take this. I told them I didn’t want to give it up, so I said, put it in a little box and give me a tab and I’ll pick it up at the other end. But they wouldn’t go for that. We argued for about twenty minutes and the plane’s going to take off. Finally, a higher-level officer takes me to the side, pulls the knife out, looks at me and says, if I let you take this on the plane, do you promise not to open it? I looked at him and thought, he must be pulling my leg. But I looked him square in the eye and said yes. He looked at me for awhile and finally said I could go with the knife. But the point is that this was a level of simplicity and straightforwardness where somebody’s word was okay. My word meant something. There was some kind of dignity between us. He could look at me and say, you promise not to do it. He looked me right in the eyes, I looked back, and I said, I promise. And this connection meant something. I was doing aikido and capoeira on an interpersonal level, and there was something from those traditions that was alive and working in that moment.
Grossinger: What about the generals like Scowcroft, or defense officials like McNamara and Kissinger, who see themselves essentially as warriors balancing the incredible destructive power of hydrogen weapons with deterrence. They believe that deterrence alone has prevented the recurrence of the cycle of twentieth-century global wars. They’ve developed their own code of honor, their military existentialism based on the philosophy of preventing war. They don’t think of themselves as military bureaucrats; they feel like philosophers of war and survival in a technological age run amok. This, of course, is based on their overall low estimation of the human race and how it will behave if left alone. They see themselves as the avatars of civilization; they are saving us from exactly that threat: what if you were a terrorist? They can’t take that chance. Everyone is potentially a terrorist on an unconscious level, so everyone is suspect, even the most honored. And, of course, everyone collectively is an even greater risk. The code of the warrior was based on consciousness and myth; the code of the existentialist military man is based on the demons of the Freudian unconscious and the neo-Darwinian territorial war. To them the fight for dignity is over, banned by the weapons themselves and their overwhelming and equalizing power. Their view of the salvation of the species lies in turning the fight over to the war and into the service of the computerized battle, a sterile but predictable form of intelligence.
Inn: Chemical warfare is not fair; biological warfare is not fair. Neither is nuclear warfare, but we’ve already used the bomb. We’ve gone beyond the point of fairness. What do we do now?
Snyder: Nuclear war is considered fair by the same people who are trying to call chemical and biological warfare unfair.
Grossinger: I think they’re distressed by the fact that once you get to a certain point it’s impossible to exclude anything. The horror of Hiroshima is still not fully understood, but we live in its shadow. Nobody likes to face the severity of the point we are now at.
Snyder: But they do, though. Like very simply, when asked, are you really developing the possibility of first-strike capacity, our military says, well, of course. You have to have all your options open. In modern warfare there is nothing that’s excluded from the possibilities of your thinking.
Almeida: In the wars of the past too. The warriors used whatever they had available, poisoned arrows, boiling water and sorcery.
Snyder: Sometimes.
Almeida: In the end, always. The boxer does not use his legs during a match only because the rules of the sport do not allow him to do that. In spite of treaties and international agreements, in war it is different. Legal or illegal, any effective action will be used in order to save your skin or preserve power. Any other thought about this matter will be a romantic interpretation for a situation of real danger. So, it comes to the point: is there any kind of acceptable war? I agree with Richard when he says that the soldier in the front line has no dignity when he is ordered to kill or be killed. Maybe an old-fashioned samurai had dignity because he had a sense of pride derived from a culture that highly valued warfare. In a contemporary war, the descendants of samurais probably would not have such dignity because they lack a similar sense of pride. If one gets involved in war it becomes a real question of survival. Then, he will use all the weapons that he can. So, for many reasons there is no dignity in nuclear war, including the fact that the ultimate weapon will fatally reach others that do not believe in that war and do not want to be involved in it. For the individual fight, the issue assumes a different perspective. At the moment you are fighting, your opponent becomes yourself. You confront your fears, your strength and weakness, your life itself. You do this without involving anybody besides your opponent and you. I have been involved in thousands of fights in my life, so I know what it is to feel this kind of thing inside. You know you must win. But to win means to win with yourself. But when you fight in a war, you have no dignity; you will be a samurai dying in the dirt and not wanting to.
Snyder: I think that’s right. War to my mind means organized battles, organized conflict between nations, between states. War is a function of civilization.
Heckler: That’s an interesting point. So much cooperation must happen in a war. Perhaps we need to ask ourselves how to channel this urge for cooperation to strengthen ourselves and our communities instead of defeating an external enemy. Aikido training goes a long way in working with our attitudes of cooperation and aggression.
Snyder: And the organization in warfare is ordered from the top. The guy out there who has to be sent out by a general, the only dignity that he has is maybe believing what he’s doing is for a good cause, and he’s not even sure of that. That’s the little shred of dignity he clings to.
Almeida: A good cause could be lots of money and power. Most soldiers and even generals went into war just for the financial reward.
Snyder: The footsoldiers who were sent out, many of them never even believed in what they were going out for anyway. Whoever was sent out in Napoleon’s armies had no stake in that struggle and didn’t even think they did. They had to be kept there by force. People have to be forced to go to war.
Epperlein: War has changed because forms of communication between people have changed; it’s much more indirect nowadays, with all the media.
Snyder: At a certain point on the battlefield soldiers who don’t keep going forward and start coming back will get shot by their officers. That’s the threat that finally keeps them out there.
Epperlein: War is more indirect communication; it is really a symptom of our society now.
Snyder: More and more abstract.
Epperlein: More abstract, less direct confrontation.
Grossinger: We do keep coming back to the distinction between fighting of necessity and organized ideological war.
Snyder: Maybe not a necessity.
Grossinger: Well, it arises from people’s perception of a necessity. But what I’m coming to is that the notion of the war being the “fight enlarged” isn’t really true from an experiential point of view. Bira has pointed out the fight is a totally different thing. So what is war? Is it an invention of technology? Does a historical change occur in society when the person defeated fairly in a fight goes and gets a gun and shoots the warrior? I think that the power of warriors (like samurai or t’ai chi masters) to be a force in society and to serve as a kind of hidden army maintaining justice by never fighting, or rarely fighting, was diminished when they could be overcome by someone of much less skill and character simply possessed of a forged weapon. It doesn’t seem fair that technology should so tip the moral pendulum, but it has, and the hydrogen war is the consequence of that writ large. Where is the warrior now? It’s no wonder that the military existentialists can think of themselves as warriors because they too fight with deterrents and withheld power.
Inn: The warriors of the past were given a high status in society. They were the guardians of society — the samurai in Japan, the ksytria in India. Today with the threat of nuclear war and with the high prospect of total annihilation of life as we know it, the warrior-soldier is held in low esteem as one who will carry out this threat. He is no longer a guardian of society but a threat to the society that he is protecting by inviting nuclear retaliation. In the past, the martial artist/warrior was a man who merged his practice with certain spiritual disciplines to make himself a better fighter. He did this by trying to solve the spiritual questions of existence and death. It was the merging of his art with spiritual practices which gave him a wisdom which others respected. But I don’t see that the war and the fight represent opposite spiritual universes. In both the T’ai Chi Classics and The Book of Suntzu, the individual’s technique and strategy could be enlarged to a grander scale with armies, and one can serve as a model for the other. They both go back to the more basic philosophy of Taoism.
Grossinger: There isn’t complete separation, but of course there’s never complete separation between things in the world. So I’m not sure where that leads. I’m just thinking aloud. What you’re saying is the fight and the war must both follow Taoist laws of nature. The forces that work atomically also work the mind and body of individuals, in their emotions, on and in society. So you are saying that although the forces of modern war arise from ideology and come from applied technology and conscious military goals, they must also represent ancient and eternal forces of the universe. But then what ancient forces do they represent? Is it possible that they represent other ancient forces than those that generate the fight and that the warrior feels?
Snyder: Yes. They represent the institutionalization of greed. War is a function of the institutionalization of greed, and only tangentially an extension of the human (particularly male) delight in collision.
Grossinger: So maybe war is not the fight writ large but writ small. The fight is the experience of the largeness of things; the war is a diminishment of that.
Snyder: War is greed writ large, using fight. Or misusing fight.
Grossinger: And a different technology.
Snyder: See, you cannot ignore history. You cannot simply be psychological and existential in these projections. There is a watershed that takes place when the state is formed, when the nation-state comes into existence. The nation-state moves by its own dynamics, which is the interests of a few as against the interests of the many. And the interest of the few is essentially greed. War is their greed using the willingness of young men to fight.
Heckler: Where does that leave us?
Snyder: I don’t know.
Heckler: I come from the martial-arts and the psychological perspective, and I know historically what you’re saying is true, but I always return to my own experience and I know as a martial artist that once you start to cultivate yourself, there’s a tendency to say, does it work? Would it work on the street? Could I really defend myself? Can I beat the other person? What it is that the individual’s trying to look for in himself seems to be a key question. The historical perspective, although true, is just not my perspective. What I know is my own experience, and I feel we all need to look within at our own greed and violence and love. But as martial artists, are we always stuck presenting our techniques to the greedy few? Can the martial arts be used as a way to work with our aggression and not simply a way to develop our paranoia or defeat someone?
Snyder: You’ve got three choices: one is, you work for the ruling elite; one is, you stay clear of them; and the third is that you fight them.
Almeida: The fighter went to war in the past because he was forced to, or because he found himself more qualified for that job than for carpentry or whatever. It does not mean necessarily that he went to show off skills or to test techniques. By this perspective, a traditional kind of war can be considered as an extension of an individual fight. But do not believe that the fighters really assumed the cause of the war they fought in.
Snyder: That’s what I’m saying too. It’s the objectives of the ruling class, using fighters.
Heckler: It’s an exploitation of the fighter and the warrior.
Snyder: Like I used to know guys back at the time of the Korean War. I was going to court myself at that time. And there were some non-nonviolent anarchists refusing to go to the Korean War. The judge was giving everybody a good deal if they’d say, “I’m nonviolent. I wouldn’t hurt a fly!” OK, well, you can be a conscientious objector. Then these guys come along and say: “No, I’m not theoretically nonviolent, but I’m not going to fight your war.” What’s this argument? they say. And the guy says, “Look, I’m just not going to have the state tell me who to kill. If I ever must do such a deed, I’ll decide for myself.” That’s another perspective. This is an argument: the state is an abstraction, and one wouldn’t want to do something as serious as killing without thinking through one’s own thoughts on it. I knew men like that. They got sent to prison.
Inn: Another perspective is: would there be wars as we know it if women ran everything instead of men? Would they bring about something very different than the male-oriented world? If you had mothers sitting in front of the buttons, would they push them?
Grossinger: What we don’t know is whether that’s been tested yet. We don’t know if Margaret Thatcher is a test of that. Is she? I don’t think she is. Not Indira Gandhi. Women who arise through male society take on the male persona.
Epperlein: They have become men in order to succeed.
Inn: That’s a theoretical question, and my suspicion is that it would be quite different.
It’s the same thing in aikido. Even though you are confronting another person you understand that it’s really between you and you. And even if you lose externally, it’s still you and you internally. And even if you win, it’s still you and you. This refers to the words of Master Ueshiba, the founder of aikido, when he said, “The opponent is within you.”
Snyder (to Almeida): I’ve been reading your book, and it’s very wonderful. The history of capoeira, like the history of kung fu, shows cases in which the fighters arose from below. They rose from the underclass. And those were not fighters like samurai who worked for the ruling elite. They came out of an oppressed class, to keep their own dignity, their own manhood. “Karate” means “empty hand”; they couldn’t afford weapons. “Kung Fu” means empty hands, too. When the Japanese took over Okinawa many years ago, they literally forbade anybody to own any weapons, and at the same time the samurai police of the Okinawan Islands had freedom to cut anybody down with a sword who looked at them cross-eyed. So they developed karate in Okinawa as self-defense against drunk samurai with swords, when they didn’t have any weapons themselves.
Almeida: I do not know for sure if the slaves used capoeira as a means of self-defense. We capoeirists like the idea of capoeira being primarily a fight. In my book I presented one of the theories about the origins of capoeira — as an “empty hand” fight against the invaders of the Afro-American civilizations developed by runaway slaves in the backland of Brazil. These civilizations were called Quilombos, and one of them, the Quilombo Dos Palmares, lasted for one century with more than 40,000 inhabitants. Many people explain the fact that capoeira uses more feet than hands as a result of the slaves having their hands chained during their fights to escape. This idea seems unrealistic to me. It is practically impossible to rely on an empty hand technique against fire weapons. So, I believe that capoeira, as a fight, evolved from ritualistics and dance movements. Now, there occurs to me one question: would the fighter exist if there was no war to fight in?
Snyder: Were the gang fights in Chicago or New York or Bahia wars between different groups?
Heckler: I think it’s an interesting question, and my first response is yes. I think that it’s also the work of a fighter, maybe a more awakened fighter, to put the notion of the warrior without a war into a context. From what I understand, that’s how break-dancing started. There were these gang wars in New York, and many people were getting killed or seriously injured. All of a sudden friends were gone: dead, in jail, or burnt out on drugs. Then somebody had the sense to see that this war mentality wasn’t working. So they transformed this competitive urge to confront another gang into dancing, which was probably influenced by capoeira. There is this aggression and competitiveness that we all need to look at in ourselves and in our society. We need new rituals to work sanely with aggression, see what it is, and transform it.
Grossinger: American kids don’t necessarily understand capoeira or take it on in context, but from seeing or hearing about the ritual dance-fight, they intuit something at its heart, and even though most of them are unfamiliar with its moves, they reinvent them from remote images in their own street context, even as Afro-Brazilians reinvented their own African ceremonies in the New World to make capoeira. What’s wonderful about break-dancing is how extreme it is. War looks middle-class and mediocre beside it, a drudgery without imagination. I realize I’m talking psychologically, but war represents repression of certain instincts and archetypes which come out in capoeira or break-dancing. The modern war is, as Bira says, comfortable because it suppresses the real ritual outpouring of people’s guts. The national leaders of world powers and arms negotiators embrace and give each other these big hugs as though there’s some intimacy, but they’re revealing nothing and exchanging nothing. They have defined the world in such sterile terms, human contact in such limited terms, that they are not capable of coming to an agreement, a real agreement, even as much as the street gangs are. They cannot “break.” Street dancing may express ritual enmity, but it is personal, it is revealing and imaginative, so in its radicalness it’s really more intimate. It transforms and heals aspects of the enmity, and makes an alliance; it fuses groups in a place of meeting. I think insofar as war represents greed it doesn’t even bear good honest antagonism, which will transform its participants if acted through in an authentic way. War can never transform through intimacy; it is this other thing, cold and sterile.
Heckler: I think, why do I do these things? Why do I do capoeira? Why do I do aikido? There’s a ritual in them that is very rich for me.
Snyder: And joy.
Heckler: And challenging. I’ve seen people take an aikido test, lawyers and doctors, totally competent men and women. They take this simple test in front of their peers, and it’s one of the biggest rituals they’ve had in their entire lives. They’re nervous, they feel themselves deeply, and they go through changes. The same in capoeira. It’s so rich and it’s so big, and we don’t have these kinds of rituals and forms in our lives and educational system.
Snyder: It’s because we don’t get them.
Heckler: We get “Charlie’s Angels” and we get “The A Team.”
Grossinger: And nuclear war is another TV program. Sterile. A projection.
Snyder: Bira said this earlier, about the comfortableness of our modern war — well, I think that we fall into that comfortableness partly as a function of not having done “fighting” as young people, and gotten over that fear. The fact that people haven’t learned how to feel a certain level of confrontation and challenge and physical contact as young people means that when they get older they’re fearful, so they have to make their wars more abstract. And shoot from a greater and greater distance. There would be something healthy in acting it out on a youthful level. It doesn’t have to be fighting. When I was a young man, I was a mountain climber. I never fought people, but I went out and risked myself on ice climbs. I got to see myself grow — while scaring the wits out of myself.
Inn: There’s a tremendous element of danger in the martial arts. You’re defeated either by your own ego or the other person’s ego, and that defeat represents the challenge and resolution — whether you have the first level conquered, your own ego, and then the second level, the competition with another ego. It can be a mountain or a person. It’s the danger that attracts us, the fear, the conquering of fear.
Snyder: I think it’s partly the fear of fear. You have to learn that it’s not half as bad in experience as it is in imagination. And then you become free of it.
Inn: I think that Buddhist discipline and the very abstract spiritual cultivation in the martial arts is the elimination of the ego, which will defeat you in a confrontation. But a very interesting outcome is that once you have conquered your own fear and ego in a personal confrontation, winning builds up a kind of external ego, so you become better and better through defeating your own ego. It’s a dual thing.
Snyder: In learning how to deal with your own ego you also learn how subtle it is. Winning is really a very minor part of it.
Heckler: Other than break-dancing one of the original American forms of ritual is this game where people go out and shoot each other with paint pellets. They have organized teams and tactical little wars with referees, and it supposedly simulates combat. They go through the war, and then they have a party afterwards. It makes me think about what you were saying: if you do that as a youth, then maybe you don’t have to do it later.
For some people, if they don’t have a ritual they think, well how can I face this fear, and if they’re not going to climb a mountain, they think well, maybe I’ll be in a war with this gun and see who I am under pressure. But perhaps we can simulate this whole thing in such a way that we can reflect who we are or who we can possibly be, in a way that is not destructive.
Inn: What about sports? Don’t many of the sports come out of warfare? And there’s the American love of violence and football. If we’re not personally involved in our own challenge with ourselves in the martial arts, we need some sort of hero to do it for us.
Grossinger: I am looking to piece some of these threads together. For instance, the problem with things on TV is that people don’t actually experience them but see them mentally and project onto them. I suppose that abstract and romantic warfare is the same. People imagine themselves through wars, but they don’t experience them in actuality. They experience a fantasy of glory, a fantasy of explosions, a fantasy of handling powerful weapons. And these fantasies can be co-opted by greed and then institutionalized, as Gary said. Greed must arise from the failure to confront fear, to confront mortality. The ultimate goal of greed would be to get enough protection around one’s self to feel unassailable. Because the protection is only external, it is also illusory. Any real fight, any real war, even any real meditation instantly exposes your vulnerability and your mortality. Greed plays off people’s illusion that they might live forever in a material sphere. Unable to transform or internalize experiences, they have to acquire external power in ever greater amounts. And once you get addicted to it, it gets worse and worse. It reminds me of the parapsychologist Jule Eisenbud’s theory that what nuclear armaments represent is the fear of our own power, our real internal and psychic power. If, as he suggests, we have the power to change things by our minds alone, to kill with our minds, then we are engaged in a massive denial of that power. The more deeply we bury its secret and pretend to separate ourselves from it, pretend we don’t have it, the more we need superarmaments. This weaponry is an enormous distraction to polarize us away from the truth at its heart, which is that we don’t need it because we can kill with our minds. The nuclear bomb is voodoo sublimated and collectivized through technology. Whether one wants to accept the paraphysics of that, it does express the myth of what we’ve been talking about — that the failure to develop internal power and internal feeling processes rebounds externally to the same degree and represents itself in some sort of external pathology or violence as a cover-up for the fear and also the loss of power that lies at its center.
Epperlein: Nuclear power comes from our minds, from the nuclear scientists; it is our invention.
Snyder: I think it’s not quite right to say it comes from us, though. I’m always very careful not to automatically let myself be identified with everybody. It comes from certain people who made the choice to be employed by certain forces to put their intelligence to work for pay and then to sell those inventions and let them be used by certain people. I think it would be very healthy for us to be careful about taking these things on ourselves. I won’t take it on myself that just because there’s a nuclear confrontation between the Soviet Union and us that it’s my human nature; it’s not my human nature. There are historical and social forces that caused that, forces I stand against and always have.
Epperlein: Sometimes not employed by the state.
Snyder: The ones that invented the nuclear bomb? They were employed by the state. And from way back.
Epperlein: But the way that they did it was not for the state. It’s because it’s their profession; it’s because they’re interested in the atom.
Snyder: They had the choice of which project they would work on. You always have the choice to say who is going to pay you. Where does your money come from? Who pays your salary?
Grossinger: But there is a degree to which it’s pure knowledge, and it would have been discovered anyway.
Snyder: In the history of the atom bomb that break goes way back. At the point where the pure knowledge of subatomic physics, the possibility of nuclear explosions, began to move toward practical application, it was a conscious choice in every case.
Grossinger: But I think most of those people made the choice because they thought it would be discovered anyway, and possibly by the Germans or Japanese.
Snyder: They knew the consequences when they went to work on it.
Epperlein: I think not. I think they didn’t know that. . . .
Snyder: Oh yes they did. You can read the history of it. See Robert Jungk’s Brighter Than a Thousand Suns.
Epperlein: Yes, as an energy.
Snyder: It’s one thing to know theoretically that such an energy is possible. It’s another to take a job with somebody who is going to make it happen.
Grossinger: Don’t you feel it’s a case of what if the next guy’s a terrorist? They did it only because they didn’t want to be beaten to it.
Snyder: The history of it is that the refugee German scientists who fled Nazi Germany — this is in Brighter Than a Thousand Suns — and came to the United States, and this includes Einstein, were so appalled by what was happening to the Jews, and were suspicious that their colleagues left behind in Germany with the same knowledge that they had would be going to work trying to make an atomic weapon for Hitler, that they convinced Roosevelt that they should start a progam in this country in that direction. Since many of those refugees were Jews, if the Nazis hadn’t been doing a heavy number on the Jews, the atom bomb probably never would have been developed.
Grossinger: I find that hard to believe. It would have just waited for some other war, or cold war.
Snyder: You know things don’t just happen automatically. It takes a historical combination of events, times, and places for things to happen. Einstein himself was extremely dubious about going ahead on this, but because of what was happening in Europe, he overcame his own fear of it and went to work on it. And then the intensified hatred and dislike of Nazism brought liberals like J. Robert Oppenheimer into working on the project. Oppenheimer would have never worked on it if he didn’t think Nazism was so evil.
Grossinger: But what I can’t believe is that the critical constellation of events wouldn’t have occurred in a different way years later.
Snyder: I’d say not necessarily. It would be too deterministic to say that that’s automatically going to happen. Also, it takes funding. It doesn’t happen without funding, and because of the war, because of the reputation the Nazis had, the chemistry between Roosevelt, Einstein, and Oppenheimer — and Teller — they threw a lot of money into it not knowing at all that it was even going to work. You might not even get the funding together for such a program if there wasn’t a whole lot going to make it happen. At any rate, there’s a real history behind it, and the history involves conscious choices made by many individuals, including a number of scientists who were equally qualified to work on it and refused to — names you don’t know, because they never got famous, because they didn’t work on it.
Epperlein: But I also think civilization in general is the cause of inventing nuclear power, nuclear weapons — getting power over the world with your mind.
Snyder: Whose civilization?
Epperlein: Our civilization.
Snyder: Look, there’s all these countries in South America who never invented any atom bombs. They didn’t even invent jet airplanes. But they’re civilized.
Epperlein: I mean all the civilizations on this planet.
Snyder: It doesn’t follow. No, it doesn’t follow. The difference between Latin European culture and Northern European culture is striking in that regard. They are both civilizations, but Latin civilization does not involve technology on a mass scale. Northern European civilization does. It happens to be a peculiar quality of Northern European civilization. It’s not a quality of Mediterranean civilization to develop an atom bomb.
Grossinger: I see the point but it’s hard for me to accept. I guess I believe the opposite, that it was inevitable and that it represents the quintessential crisis of this creature on this planet. To me the development of nuclear technology is an outcome of the evolution of life. But I can see too that there might have been other technologies, other modes of civilization, ones unknown to us of course, that were never developed.
Snyder: My sense of history and events is never one of inevitability. I don’t believe there’s any one linear process that’s inevitable. At every point the karma is open. We are making our fates constantly. We are not creatures of fate; we make our fate now. Oppenheimer made his fate and made our fate; Einstein made his fate and made our fate. But it’s open; it was open.
Grossinger: I can accept that our present now is open, perhaps in the sense of the homoeopathic literature where it says that whatever disease the patient has, whatever the symptoms are, that’s the beginning point of the cure. You cannot go back hypothetically to a less pathological state, even one that existed five minutes ago, but you could have changed the whole course of the disease by treating it then. You don’t say, if only the person hadn’t gotten this disease; if only I had acted five minutes ago. . . . Where you begin, as long as the person is alive, is the particular dynamic of the present; and as long as the person is alive, the disease has a cure, though it may take a miraculous yoga to attain it. A month or a year later it might be a totally different disease with a different cure. I feel that way about the nuclear problem in our civilization.
Snyder: I agree, but I would also say that not only do we start right here, but part of our cure is realizing right away that it wasn’t inevitable, that it wasn’t human nature, and that it wasn’t even the only thing our civilization could do. We are free of those inevitabilities.
Almeida: I agree with what you say, but I also think that there could have been a worse alternative.
Snyder: Could there be worse?
Almeida: I think so.
Grossinger: We could have had a nuclear war already.
Snyder: Oh, all sorts of things could have happened. Hitler could have won the war, taken over Germany and France. But you know when they went into Germany after the war, they had some OSS men running ahead of the troops even, who went right into the labs and the offices of the German nuclear scientists, to see how much they had done and how far they had gone, and those guys had stonewalled it and hadn’t done a thing for Hitler. They were nowhere near the development of an atomic weapon in Germany. They weren’t about to do it. They stonewalled it. They wouldn’t cooperate. And so, in a sense, it was all unnecessary.
Heckler: Well, one thing is for sure now. The knowledge is out there. And that’s really what we’re dealing with. If we stop building them, somebody else will. It’s a question of how we now deal with this knowledge.
Hough: And it’s a major industry, selling the nuclear weapons to other countries.
Heckler: One place that I take my work is in education. I’m thinking that the information about weaponry is out there, it’s happening. How can we teach kids about conflict resolution? There’s always going to be a .38; there’s always going to be a knife; there’s always going to be a fist. Likewise nuclear bombs. The militarist seems so far away, but I feel that it might be worth it to work with kids. Someday they’re going to be holding the guns. Even if it’s all melted down; we have it.
Snyder: We have to start making some things taboo.
Grossinger: How can you trust rational behavior that much?
Snyder: But it will become taboo. If we survive at all it will be because nuclear weapons will have become tabooed, deeply tabooed, so deeply tabooed that even though the knowledge is there nobody will go after it.
Heckler: Do you think it would override that greed?
Snyder: Granted some minor cultural changes, yes. Greed doesn’t have to be institutionalized.
Heckler: But if it’s an element in our history and it’s remembered, then it’s an element we need to work with.
Snyder: There are many things in our history that we have forgotten. Some very powerful knowledges in the past have been lost, partly because they were abused.
Hough: You mean like alchemy.
Snyder: Yes. Or like killing with your mind. They became taboo.
Grossinger: According to Eisenbud, the trouble with making them taboo is that we externalized them. As nuclear weapons.
Epperlein: In Europe, the peace movement looks very different from the United States, and it’s very strongly on a personal level for people. The peace movement means more working with yourself, with your neighbors, with your own state. That is something that has arisen very strongly from fear of a nuclear war. I’m from Germany, but the peace movement is now very strong in Holland, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy. People get together and start to create a different lifestyle to counteract that real threat which is everyday there. Something has already changed with people. Governments are not interested in that of course, because what it does is it brings people away from being able to fight for the state. The awareness is more on collectives of people and communicating with people, whoever and wherever they are.
Hough: When Mitterand was here and was asked about the Greens, he just flipped it off like a fly and said it was nothing, it wasn’t strong.
There would be something healthy in acting it out on a youthful level. It doesn’t have to be fighting. When I was a young man, I was a mountain climber. I never fought people, but I went out and risked myself on ice climbs. I got to see myself grow — while scaring the wits out of myself.
Epperlein: The Greens are not necessarily the peace movement. What I am talking about as the peace movement is something which is actually happening in the people. It’s not an institution. It’s more an awareness of people who want to integrate that fear into their lives. Being bombed and being destroyed is not such an abstraction to people in Europe, so they want to make it part of their lives and change something. It’s interesting how fast the minds of the people change under that pressure. The threat of nuclear war has this positive effect of bringing people closer.
Heckler: I’ve often thought that. It’s surfaced a certain fear and really made people come into contact with themselves in a new way.
Epperlein: They’re much more gentle. They try to be not as aggressive.
Inn: Don’t you feel that because America has not suffered a real war here, we don’t feel it, it’s very abstract?
Snyder: That’s why we’re so belligerent.
Hough: Also, grassroots peace movement people who just organize often aren’t talking about real things. They can be mindless and belligerent too.
Snyder: Yes, I know.
Grossinger: I have trouble with such people, but I also have trouble with my attitude. It seems indulgent and arrogant on my part. I have no patience for someone who always shows up with another petition to sign or a poster for another march. I react negatively to that because it seems automatic and out of touch with the turbulent reality of our situation. It’s reduction of consciousness which leads away from the possibility of change. People softening and opening in themselves are cause for hope; people just identifying with something, even the “right” cause, don’t give me much hope. You don’t see real compassion for the human condition in them. It’s more, this is my allegiance, this is what I’m for, and you better believe I’m on the right side. I’m not sure that reaches the opposition, or the part of all of us that’s stuck. But you get political strength and change through numbers, so I don’t challenge its value.
Heckler: You’re talking about the aggression in it, right?
Grossinger: Yes, well, the passive aggression.
Heckler: Like we’re going to have peace, damnit, or I’ll wring your neck. When the Dutch were in Bali, the Balinese, at one point, started to commit suicide to defy their oppressors, and the Dutch couldn’t stand that so they started shooting them.
Snyder: That’s a government type of reaction. It’s a decision made by an entity that’s into having all the power and all the say and is frustrated by not having it. If the underclass finds a way not to respond, it infuriates them terribly.
Heckler: Well, Gary, you always have that historical response, but I feel there’s something personally psychological. . . .
Snyder: The government is a psychology too.
Heckler: All I can say is that it’s inside us, that’s where the looking has to be done.
I have no patience for someone who always shows up with another petition to sign or a poster for another march. I react negatively to that because it seems automatic and out of touch with the turbulent reality of our situation. It’s reduction of consciousness, which leads away from the possibility of change.
Grossinger: When we lived in Richmond, the alternative school that our daughter Miranda went to decided it was going to teach the peace movement to first through third grades, and the teachers put lots of letter-writing and peace marches onto the calendar. During the time that happened, Miranda fell more than a year and a half behind grade level, and she was bombarded with a whole lot of boring rhetoric for which she had no context. She was denied basic tools of thought and evaluation and instead fed a party line. The teachers and parents felt they had to act to counter a terrible threat to the planet, but it was partly because many of them had failed to be aware of that threat most of their lives that they acted as though the weapons had just been put into place yesterday and were a pure and unique upsurge of right-wing evil. Their anger was righteous and self-aggrandizing and suggested guile. It was almost hysterical. They were going to ram peace and love down everyone’s throat. They were going to fill the kids with an ideology which could only confuse and harm them because it was so fixed and demonic itself. In people shouting peace I sometimes hear only a narcissistic masquerade of denial — pure denial of their own inner truth. When we objected in the parents’ meetings we got screamed at by people who accused us directly of supporting nuclear war and of not realizing the direness of the threat.
Snyder: That sounds very Berkeley. You’ve got to believe Berkeley sounds real weird when you’re up in the Sacramento Valley. You know these people who put these programs out on KPFA on the radio don’t realize that guys driving giant tractors in the ricefields in the northern Sacramento Valley — these guys are driving back and forth in these huge tractors cultivating four thousand acres of rice — they’re laughing their heads off.
What I find about those people, about that mind-set, is that it has its own level of aggression in it of course, passive aggression, but it seems to me that it’s shortcutting something that we’ve been talking about for their children in their health — which is learning how to have conflict — that the solution doesn’t abstractly lie in saying that we’re going to eliminate conflict from ourselves and the world; it must lie in the direction of how, artfully and skillfully and compassionately, to engage in conflict.
Grossinger: Well, naturally a number of kids got confused and didn’t know if they were for or against the bomb; the kids were just too young to comprehend the issue, so they were drawing these pictures of missiles falling on houses and great explosions.
Epperlein: Kids thought they were doing the right thing.
Grossinger: And the whole thing of peace marches and standing up together in hope has been ruined for Miranda because it’s been imposed on her so authoritarianly. She thinks, marches, yuk! It’s the worst possible school activity — boring, frightening, involving crowded cars and preoccupied adults. It doesn’t make good “peace” kids; it probably makes some of them into Hell’s Angels later on. And that doesn’t mean you can’t do it, but I think education has to be through internalization, not ideologization. A big California weakness is to be so ignorant of history as to think that each new radical thing that comes up is a turning-point in the universe. Californians tend to think that history moves at the speed of our lives.
Heckler: I know people, peace activists, who think once we all come to our senses we’ll be able to settle down with our old ladies on forty acres of land and be peaceful from then on. Kind of like peace is a static thing.
Grossinger: And there won’t be a resolution on that level. I think it’s the realization that a “world without war” won’t be created that way that makes one object to that kind of oversimplification. If people believe their own simplifications, then they might not be up to the real task that’s at hand.
Snyder: A specifically American weakness is the ignorance of Marx. The rest of the educated world, whether it’s far Eastern or European, is absolutely appalled by the failure of the American intelligentsia to read their Marx and to digest it, to understand what was being said there. I was in Sweden last year. Everyone is so astute historically and politically on such things. Even the best educated Americans have this big gap which is European history and Marx. Not to become Marxists but to go beyond being Marxists.
Heckler: I was thinking about how when Bira first came to this area, a lot of the other martial arts were these combative types and Bira actually had to fight these guys. They were really good fighters. My experience in that area is that when you beat somebody, then you are over them. There’s an unconscious automatic hierarchical system. So Bira encountered these people from East Oakland, Berkeley, and San Francisco; he basically beat everybody and then showed them that he respected them. And it was so surprising to everybody because that’s the thing that didn’t happen. If you beat somebody you were the next rank up or had ten more dollars, or in Japan they have dojo-busters, they challenge you and defeat you and it’s their dojo. But from Bira’s character and temperament, there issued a sense of I respect you. In fact, maybe I respect you more because we’ve just gone through this fight. It kind of set a whole context for how I see capoeira in the Bay Area. It’s like that term “constructive conflict.” We all have conflict in us and by closing our eyes or going on marches it’s not going to go away. We need to interact with our conflict and construct something workable and creative with it.
Snyder: I did a lot of study on Plains Indian fighting. Those guys had such class. They threw their lives away a lot, you know. They really did throw their lives away just for style. It’s really incredible, though. It had nothing to do with war. It had to do with style as much as anything. It had to do with name. It had to do with doing something that the other guys would say, wow, that was far out.
Grossinger: Very elaborate break-dancing.
Snyder: Like riding single-handedly into an enemy group, just taking off and riding straight into it, without anybody backing you, that was one of the things that they would do. Almost certain death. And it was all done real stylishly.
My sense of history and events is never one of inevitability. I don’t believe there’s any one linear process that’s inevitable. At every point the karma is open. We are making our fates constantly. We are not creatures of fate; we make our fate now.
Almeida: Sometimes you don’t have a second chance because you did a stupid thing. It’s good to fight, though, I think.
Snyder: It’s probably good to live, too.
Almeida: I think it is important for a person to have the chance to fight in order to understand better oneself and the others. For me, the contemporary war is meaningless and it is not the right way for the warrior because it is indiscriminate death. You cannot grow from death. But you certainly grow from the training for the fight or even the fight itself. I have a very down-to-earth perspective on that because life takes more guts than philosophy. It is like a great “jogo do capoeira”; not so much theorizing and speculations. There is lots of talk about internal and external power, how to kill with the mind and so on. Sometimes it seems to be a fantasy to get lost in. The real thing is to kneel under the “berimbau” and fight whatever kind of “jogo do capoeira” it commands. Talking about philosophy, I really like Marin classes because they make me think about things that I know almost instinctively without verbalizing them. One day I said in class that my master told me that caporeia is treachery. From that moment on Richard Heckler has been asking me what is the treachery of everyday life. It is a hell of a question.
Snyder: The first noble truth of Buddhism, Sarjam dukha, is that everything is impermanent and unsatisfactory, and always treacherous.
Grossinger: It’s just too bad it had to lead to nuclear weapons.
Snyder: If people accepted that truth, they wouldn’t even have to have nuclear weapons. As you said, it’s fear that generates greed. You can be fearless in the world if you have made peace with impermanence and suffering.
Heckler: Do you think you need a practice in order to experience that?
Snyder: I think for most people, yes. Some people experience that principle existentially and directly. But it seems to be rare. It seems that our ego gives us little defenses and protections, even everyday garden variety ego. To learn not to rely on those crutches is what a practice is, is to keep them naked. And then finally to make you laugh. And then you begin to be fearless. You begin to be. Meditation is like fighting. Meditation is a kind of fighting. It’s where you just simply sit down and confront yourself. And keep confronting yourself.
Almeida: We Brazilians do not meditate so much. Maybe that’s the reason that the economy is so bad in Brazil right now. I feel a constant desire not to compromise what you are. That is what makes capoeira interesting to me. It is a challenge to improve techniques, to try to understand more and more about this art that reflects so much of you. Capoeira is like a mirror in which you look at yourself before you wash your face in the morning. You see yourself simply the way that you are and you are there by yourself and yourself alone. You have no one from whom you ask help.
Heckler: This may be a good meeting, Gary; you can take a class from Bira and then show him some meditation.
Almeida: A good idea.
Grossinger: This taping gave us an excuse to have a meeting together that we might not have had otherwise. It wouldn’t have worked if we had just had a party.
Snyder: You’re right, a party is not quite the right form. And it’s hard to get people to say, let’s just sit down together and talk about something. Unless you have an ostensible reason to do it. So it’s a good game. It’s helped me clarify some of the things I’m trying to think through. I find it hard to work with this. I find certain conflicts in myself that I’m still working on because I’m still trying to understand, as I’m sure I always will be, the many levels of the meaning of the first Buddhist precept: not to be harmful, not to harm. This is the fundamental moral precept of Buddhism. The rest are in a sense just variations. Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Buddhist priest, said we mustn’t be dualistic even about war and peace, or about warlikeness and peacefulness. Peace contains war, war contains peace. In any situation, in any place, in any condition, even in the battle right in the middle of the war, you must appreciate and be grateful for the little bit of nonviolence or a little bit of less harmfulness or intelligent nonharmfulness that might be practiced there. And we must be alert in a parallel way in the realm of peace to the kinds of aggression that take place.
Copyright © 1984 by Richard Grossinger and Lindy Hough
