The Soft Overcomes the Hard

By Mahadev Shankar

The following is the text of Dato Mahadev Shankar’s speech delivered at the forum “From A Culture Of Violence To A Culture Of Peace” held at Wisma Kebudayaan SGM, Kuala Lumpur on September 2, 2007 in conjunction with the opening of the exhibition “From A Culture Of Violence To A Culture Of Peace: Transforming the Human Spirit.”

First of all I want to thank Soka Gakkai International, Soka Gakkai Malaysia and the Physicians for Peace and Social Stability for inviting me to share my thoughts with you on a matter of life and death for human civilisation as we know it.

Like Physicians for Peace and Social Responsibility, our goal is to promote well-being, not with the surgeon’s scalpel under general anaesthetic, but to stimulate the power of self-healing that is inherent in us through inter-active diagnosis.

Two parables may help to focus our minds on some implications of what is at stake.

Akbar the Great ruled India from 1556 to 1605. Although illiterate he was a great humanist. His emblem was the six pointed star of David. He had not one but six prime ministers one each to represent Islam, Hinduism, Christianity, Judaism, Jainism, and Buddhism. The Hindu was Birbal.

“Birbal,” asked Akbar, “Why are there so many cows and goats in my kingdom and so few tigers?”

Birbal took Akbar to the zoo where he had packed one cage with a herd of hungry cattle and another with a dozen ravenous tigers. Into the cattle pen he tossed in a bundle of hay. Each animal took a mouthful and retired into its corner. Into the other he threw in a dead buffalo. The tigers immediately started a fight to the finish, because not one was prepared to share meal with any of the others.

An American millionaire named McArthur decided in 1938 that the USA was inevitably going to be sucked into Europe’s war with Germany. So he moved in search of paradise to a small island in the Pacific. That island was Guadalcanal which just five years later became Japan’s most bitter battle-ground in the Second World War.

I hope these two stories will serve to illustrate that violence is self-defeating and that non-involvement is no guarantee of safety in the face of global crises today.

To attempt a comprehensive definition of what culture means could distract us from our present objective.

Suffice to say that when human beings are programmed to act or re-act in a particular way by nurture or nature, their subconscious attitudes becomes an integral part of their collective personalities. Thus an Englishman involuntarily says “Good Morning” because there is nothing so variable as the English weather. A Chinese says “Sek Cho Fan Mei?” because starvation was endemic in old China. And “Apa Khabar?” is symptomatic of a thirst for truth in a country rife with rumours. More visceral examples can be found by comparing the rites of passage in different religions or better still the way each community treats its ethnic or religious minorities.

There is no single nation which can claim not to have resorted at some point in its evolution to violence as a terminal solution to its communal problems notwithstanding that history has repeatedly demonstrated that sporadic or organised violence in any shape or form is sterile because it never succeeds in achieving its original purpose and always creates more problems than it solves.

Uganda under Idi Amin, Vietnam under the French and then the Americans, Cambodia under Pol Pot, and Iraq under Bush and Blair are all glaring examples. In spite of these lessons why do the power-brokers resort to violence as a means to an end, again and again?

To understand this we have to start at the beginning.

The film “South Pacific” is a musical tale of the Pacific island paradise. But out of character with all the other songs there so full of dreams of love and hope, is this one which carries a powerful message as to origins of the culture of violence.

Let me sing it to you now:

You’ve got to be taught
To hate and fear,
You’ve got to be taught
From year to year,
It’s got to be drummed
In your little ear
You’ve got to be carefully taught.
You’ve got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made,
And people whose skin is a diff’rent shade,
You’ve got to be carefully taught.
You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late,
Before you are six or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate,
You’ve got to be carefully taught!

This is the kind of mental programming that was institutionalised by Stalin, Hitler and Pol Pot to create monsters who thought nothing of genocide as a means of ethnic or political cleansing.

By way of sharp contrast, let’s take the cultural conditioning in the Victoria Institution in my time. There was no racism there. In our school song, we acknowledged our debt by singing the praises of the multi-racial fathers of our school. Down to this day, I don’t look at Tan Sri Kamarul and think he is a Malay. I don’t look at Dato’ McCoy and think in my mind here is a Eurasian of Scottish ancestry. All my old schoolmates are just other human beings to me, each worthy of the dignity of any other human being and all of us had the value of team work ingrained in us. We were taught that there are only two kinds of human beings in the world - good or bad but however bad, always redeemable.

I am far from confident that the educational structure and values we are inculcating into our youth today is geared to the same objectives. We here in Malaysia urgently need to determine whether it is not going to be too heavy a price to pay if in our frenetic search for a single spectrum mono-cultural national identity we neglect to see the value in diversity.

Hate and fear are emotional insecurities which can be traced to a thirst for “power” which once acquired rapidly turns to “greed”.

In the 19th Century the fashionable micro-definition of power was, “the capacity to bend another to one’s will.”

Today, the macro-definition of power is the capacity to distribute the resources of a nation and if coupled with military might, how the resources of another nation should be distributed according to the dominant power.

Economic duress is yet another facet of the global culture of violence today.

The worrying part of all this is that the ordinary individual seems to be totally impotent not just to prevent nation-states from going nuclear but to bring any meaningful pressure to bear on governments to ensure that a nation’s wealth is distributed in a just and equitable way.

Can this trend can be reversed? Can a culture of violence be transformed into a culture of peace?

At first sight this question looks like an exercise in futility. And indeed so it would be, if we thought we could effect the desired transformation with a wave of a magic wand.

Let us always keep in the forefront of our minds that constant dripping wears away the hardest stone and that constancy is a close cousin of - courage, confidence, and conviction.

Let’s take one example close to home.

Chee Kim Tong was one of my great heroes. He was a humble bus conductor in the Terengganu Bus Company then owned by Lim Eng, father of Dato Lim Ah Lek. In those days, it was the done thing if you knocked someone down on the East coast roads. You do not stop but scoot to the next police station and come back with an escort.

When a bus in which Chee Kim Tong knocked down someone outside Kemaman, the driver and all the passengers bolted off, leaving him to face a mob of parang wielding villagers with nothing to protect himself but his skills in unarmed combat. He transformed the kampung culture of sporadic violence to a hearty respect for the humanistic values he sought to uphold because he did not permanently harm any of his assailants.

Those skills can be traced back to my eternal hero, an itinerant Buddhist Indian monk - Daruma (also known as Bodhidharma or Damo) who created the art of Shaolin whose core discipline was directed to the purification of the mind and not as tool for bullying others. It was Bodhidharma’s teaching which in turn gave rise to every other form of Asian martial art.

History is replete with individuals who have wrought great cultural changes with no weapons except the force of their personalities and the justice of their cause.

Even though Buddha was not born in Britain, or Jesus Christ in Japan and even Muhammad was not a Bumiputra born in Malaysia, their teachings are universally revered. Truth and justice have no geographical boundaries.

With the Internet at our service, our capacity for reform is limitless. Do visit the website www.writespirit.net/authors and you will find a host of great leaders there to inspire you. All of them were simple people.

One caught my eye in my search for material for this speech. She was called Peace Pilgrim ¨C a woman who just walked across America spreading her simple message and helped to accelerate the end of the Vietnam War.

All women here, do look inside yourselves and realise the power within you. Saddam Hussein described his war against the US as “the mothers of all wars”. Saddam has certainly lost his life. It is too early to say if that war is lost. When the Russian mothers forced the Soviet Prime Minister to withdraw from Afghanistan, their battle was described as “the war of all mothers.” And they won that one by maternal persuasion.

The control freaks in whom power is concentrated only form about 0.1% of the countries they lord over. How such a small minority manages to hold sway over the multitude is a perennial paradox. But even they are persons of woman born and woman power in controlling these freaks has not been properly appreciated. To achieve the transformation we desire we need to infuse the necessary strength into the hands that rock the cradle so that they may yet rule the world.

I have noticed that when one tree of a particular species flowers in one part of the world, all the other trees of that species worldwide follow suit.

Civilisations also share that characteristic. Akbar’s reign was contemporaneous with the Renaissance in Europe, and the Ming Dynasty in China. These kingdoms were far apart and yet they reached their zenith in terms of artistic and cultural achievement together.

I am very optimistic that we have more than an even chance to transform the culture of violence to a culture of peace if we empower ourselves by making common cause with others who share our aspirations, and our capacity for compassion. As we gain momentum we will surely become a global force that cannot be ignored.

Cyberspace is a mirror which the war mongers and power brokers cannot escape. It is there that they must endure an ugliness which they cannot hide from the public thanks to the Television sets which have brought the corpses on the front-line into our drawing rooms. The transformation we so earnestly desire must take place because however hard-hearted a person is, there is surely nothing so troublesome as a guilty conscience and nothing so heart-wrenching than the grief of mothers for their dead children killed in a meaningless war.

This then is our ultimate challenge. To get those who wish to wage war and senseless destruction to come away from the killing-fields and join us in making a reality our belief that service to humanity is the best work of life.

At the request of Dato Shankar, Barbara Streisand’s song “At the same time” was played for the audience at the end of the forum. The lyrics of the song are reprinted here.

Think of all the hearts
Beating in the world
At the same time
Think of all the faces
And the stories they could tell
At the same time
Think of all the eyes
Looking out into this world
Trying to make some sense of what we see
Think of all the ways we have of seeing
Think of all the ways there are of being
Think of all the children
Being born into this world
At the same time
Feel your love surround them
Through the years they’ll need to grow
At the same time
Just think of all the hands
That will be reaching for a dream
Think of all the dreams that could come true
Yes if the hands we’re reaching with
Could come together
Joining me and you
When it comes to thinking of tomorrow
We must protect our fragile destiny
In this precious life there’s no time to borrow
The time has come to be a family
Think of all the love
Pouring from our hearts
At the same time
Yes think of all the light our love
Can shine around this world
At the same time
At the same time
Yes think what we’ve been giving
And yet think what we could lose
All of life is in our trembling hands
Its time to overcome our fears
And join to build a world that loves and understands
It helps to think of all the hearts
Beating in the world
And hope for all the hearts
Beating in the world
There’s a healing music in our hearts
Beating in this world
At the same time
At the same time

[ Courtesy October 2007 Cosmic]