On March 13, Wheatley Institute, along with the BYU Religious Education Department and the Peacemaker Project, welcomed Dr. Lawrence E. Carter to BYU campus for an inspiring speech on the necessity of active pursuit of world peace, outlining steps students could take towards establishing peace in both their personal lives and in a global community.
"If we are going to give peace a chance – with our neighbors – our cities, states, the nation – or the world – we need an inner revolution of values. That is the real movement required for peace – a movement of the mind, heart, and feet."
Dr. Carter is a historian, author, professor and founding dean of the Martin Luther King Jr. International Chapel at Morehouse College.
Lecture Transcript
I am grateful to have this platform to talk with you on the topic: A Nonviolent Peace for Human Rights: From Mood to Model to Movement to Methodology to Metaphysics to Mission. As you will see – and certainly it will not surprise you – I draw inspiration for this talk from the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., undoubtedly the most profound and prolific voice for human rights that our country has produced so far.
From Morehouse College, where he completed his undergraduate degree, Martin Luther King Jr. launched his humanitarian pilgrimage to create the Beloved Community. For that purpose, he moved out from the classroom into the pulpit, and ultimately onto national and international stages to march his way into immortality.
With his eyes fixed on the Prince of Peace, King prepared to bear the cross and grow up into the Crown of Christ.
Tonight, in the voice of Martin King – using quotes from him throughout my talk – I am calling for a new generation of humanitarians to promote a nonviolent peace as the integrity of right relations toward co-creating the sustainable Beloved Global Community.
From MOOD
In trying to define the mood of many people around the world today, I do not have to say much. I am sure you, like me, have your preferred ways of keeping up with the news. And, sadly, much of the news we see, read, and hear at home and around the world is not good.
On a global scale we are witnessing an absence of peace that manifests as both unarmed and armed conflict – everything from people launching verbal attacks on each other – face-to-face and/or via social media – to nation-states deploying bombs and missiles across borders.
In the United States, since the recent presidential election, nearly 100 new oppressive laws have been passed in states with a history of racial discrimination. The suppression of the right to vote, for example, is violence against participatory democracy – the opportunity to participate in designing one’s own future.
The aftermath of violence – from domestic abuse to political terror – is trauma: individual, cultural, ethnic, regional, national, international, religious, and cosmic.
Former Harvard Medical School psychiatrist, Judith Herman, argues that psychological trauma can be understood only in a social context. Confronting the social impact of psychological trauma and its treatments rising from inequalities and the mounting barriers to economic justice, require facing the facts of private horrors like adverse childhood experience and public horrors like war, and climate disaster.
From this dark mood, where can we turn for help?
I believe Dr. King offers a model, which he conceived more than 60 years ago, that can still serve us today.
To MODEL
Martin Luther King Jr. was a man of great faith. He understood peace through the lens of his deeply ingrained Judeo-Christian values and believed in the sacredness of all human personality.
To address the problem of the absence of peace, King believed that humankind must evolve for all conflict “a method which rejects revenge, aggression, and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.” He said, “Far from being the pious injunction of a utopian dreamer, the command to love [one’s] enemy is an absolute necessity for our survival.” Nobel Peace Prize acceptance address, December 10, 1964, Oslo, Norway.
As a young Christian studying at Morehouse College, Crozer Seminary, The University of Pennsylvania, Harvard and Boston Universities, King was captivated by the philosophies of Mohandas Karamchand “Mahatma” Gandhi.
The most fundamental principle of Gandhi’s philosophy of peace is Ahimsa or nonviolence – which is the law of love, life, creation, and the environment – as opposed to violence or Himsa, the cause of hatred, death, and destruction.
Gandhi developed the concept of systematic nonviolent resistance – both a just and imperfect weapon of moral power. Systematic nonviolent resistance is a weapon unique in history – one that cuts without wounding and ennobles the [person] who wields it. It is a sword that heals.”
King saw Gandhi’s model as “…the answer to the crucial legal, political, moral, and religious questions of [his time]; the need for [humankind] to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to oppression and violence.
As leader of the Civil Rights Movement, King adopted and embodied his own model of nonviolent social protest.
For example, in standing up to the status quo, King believed that “an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.”
In exchange for their violence against him, King bestowed love on his misguided friends and oppressors. That is how you practice nonviolence. Forgive others, not because they deserve forgiveness but because you deserve peace.
King demonstrated that the willingness to forgive is the practice of nonviolence, internally and externally. The gesture of forgiveness is a nonviolent refusal to see intentionality in other people’s mistakes.
We can summarize King’s model for nonviolent peace for civil and human rights with these seven principles:
1. Nonviolence is a way of life for courageous, loving, willing, and responsibly free people.
2. The Beloved Community is the framework for the future; it is the virtue ethical meaning of the Kingdom of Heaven on earth.
3. Attack forces of evil, not people doing evil.
4. To achieve the goal, accept transformative suffering for the sake of the cause without retaliation.
5. Avoid internal violence of the Spirit as well as external physical violence.
6. Understand that the arc of the Moral Universe is long and bends toward everyone’s liberation.
7. Nonviolent peace is an inside job.
I said earlier that the model of systematic nonviolent resistance is imperfect. That is because of the ever-changing, always-moving, constantly evolving, ever-revealing reality of the nature of our nature, our lives, our planet, our universe, and whatever-is-beyond.
Nothing is literally static. Hence, our imperfect model is God the Creator’s divine ally – a helper to our true nature of faults and flaws, with which we should not be obsessed. Change is inevitable, moods shift, people move, create new things, embrace foreign perspectives, and reinvent themselves.
Movement toward individual and institutional moral reflection is a choice using the ideal science of ethics, which is also subject to change for better or worse.
It is this movement that I turn your attention to next…
To MOVEMENT
On the foundation of his Judeo Christian faith and theology of nonviolence, emphasizing the moral superiority of nonviolent resistance and love over violence and hatred as the teaching of Jesus and the philosophy of Gandhi, Dr. King inspired and led the greatest ecumenical social justice movement in the history of United States that was designed to ensure the peace of the beloved community and equal and human rights for all Americans.
The movement included goals such as the right for Black people to vote, have access to well-paying jobs, equitable pay, safe housing, and the ability to send their children to the same good schools as white children. Indeed, it was a broad and sweeping agenda for social change.
Movements are about reflection. And Martin knew that change is anticipated reflection. He said: “We must come to see the end we seek in a society at peace with itself, is a society that can live with its conscience. That will be the day not of the white man, not of the Black man. That will be the day of [humans as humans].” MLK, March 25, 1965, Montgomery, AL.
If we are going to give peace a chance – with our neighbors – our cities, states, the nation – or the world – we need an inner revolution of values. That is the real movement required for peace – a movement of the mind, heart, and feet.
Peace must become an ethical norm like courage, love, freedom and will – all of which make the practice of virtue possible.
We must understand that peace is a verb, an active outpouring of love. And that nonviolence is absolute commitment to the way of love.
Love is not an emotional bash. It is not a soft sticky sentimentality poured across the human race promiscuously. It is the active sharing of one’s whole being into the [evolving, revealing] being of another.
The norm of love requires applied virtue ethics – an ideal science in action, with natural science and social science connections. Therefore, the foundation of global peace is a realizable moral cosmopolitan practice reflected in the beauty and agape love of long-term relationship.
So, when we say no more war, we are not calling for an anti-war movement, but for a mass movement for peace. We must focus our energies for peace, not against war. Every change in our experience is a challenge to become who we really are, and who we ought to be. Hence, we need a Department of Peace and a Secretary of Peace – not a Department of Defense or a Secretary of Defense.
“There is no path to peace. Peace is the path.” Understanding the difference requires coming from a place of enlightenment, a way that is empowering, evolutionary and revolutionary courage, wisdom, and compassion. We must be peace, the thing itself. You cannot have what you are not willing to be.
Your liberation is not a geographical move. It is a spiritual move. The highest level of spirituality is sustainable cooperation – in the health of your bio data, in realized civilization, in being able to name the constellations, in beauty, in justice, and in harmony! We are spiritual beings living in a spiritual universe. Every aspect of sustainable cooperation makes up the conceptual DNA of a constructive and positive peace.
But how? I hear you asking.
Let me say a few words about methodology…
To METHODOLOGY
In addition to being actualized individually, lasting peace ultimately must be actualized institutionally in the systems and structures of civilization, that are the skeletons for our lives.
One of the reasons the United States does not enjoy a greater degree of peace is that discrimination and the racism that motivates it still haunts America. Our democracy is not yet fully realized. America is not yet America for all of our citizens.
As German philosopher and social theorist Jurgen Habermas observed: Democracy rests on “public deliberation, and exchange; participants in discourse should possess equal chances to express their views and must not be unfairly limited when doing so. Those impacted by any decision must be allowed to deliberate freely and equally about it without being hindered by social inequalities.”
As a methodology, let us turn toward realized participatory democracy as another name for peace. Only inclusive democracy is capable of hacking through the Gordian Knots of otherwise insoluble problems. Peace is not when everyone agrees. It is when we can respect our disagreements and still play in the sandbox together.
To have an effective democracy, we must have a proper concept of human welfare that is cultivated through education. As a junior at Morehouse, King wrote in the Maroon Tiger student newspaper on “The Value of Education:”
“Education must enable one to sift and weigh evidence, to discern the true from the false, the real from the unreal, and the fact from the fiction. The function of education, therefore, is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. But education which stops with efficiency may prove the greatest menace to society. The most dangerous criminal may be the man gifted with reason, but with no morals.”
He continued: “We must remember that intelligence is not enough. Intelligence plus character—that is the true goal of education. The complete education gives one not only power of concentration, but worthy objectives upon which to concentrate.”
A humanistic education concentrates on human rights for everyone. That includes understanding and addressing the social and environmental issues that give rise to conflicts and protests, demanding cosmopolitan justice for all sections of global society, and emphasizing the maintenance of peace in the resolution of conflicts – all to the end of building the Beloved World Community Martin King worked for.
He wrote: “If we are to have peace on earth, our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Our loyalties must transcend our race, our tribe, our class, and our nation: and this means we must develop a world perspective. No individual can live alone. No nation can live alone. And as long as we try, the more we are going to have war in this world. Now the judgment of God is upon us, and we must either learn to live together as brothers [and sisters] or we are all going to perish together as fools.” Where Do We Go from Here? Annual Report, 11th Convention, Southern Christian Leadership Conference, August 19, 1967, Atlanta, GA.
As a 21st Century methodology, the Institute for Economics & Peace, an internationally renowned think tank based in Sydney, Australia, offers 8 Pillars of Peace that define the key attitudes, institutions, and methodologies that underpin peaceful societies:
1. Well-functioning Government [How governments are elected; the political culture they engender, the quality of the public services they deliver and their political stability;]
2. Sound Corporate Business Environment [Formal Institutions that support the operation of the private sector, business competitiveness, economic freedom; and the presence of regulatory systems;]
3. Equitable Distribution of Resources [Income distribution; equity and access to resources such as education, libraries that reflect world culture, and affordable healthcare;]
4. Acceptance of solidarity rights, also known as group rights, emphasizing the interconnectedness of people and guaranteeing basic human rights and freedoms, the need for collective action to address global challenges, and focusing on shared interest and responsibilities;
5. Good Relations with Neighbors [Relations between individuals and communities; cross-boundary relations; positive external relations; regionally integrated;]
6. Free Flow of Educational Information [Scaling technology to our self-hood through biotechnology to gain access to information and address stereotypes, omissions, and distortions, all of which contribute to the development of prejudice, antisemitism, racism, homophobia, xenophobia, and blocking the free flow of knowledge; the extent to which media is free and independent and citizens are well-informed;]
7. High Levels of Human Capital as Invaluable [Improves economic productivity; enables political participation, increases social capital and education; a fundamental building block through which societies can build resilience and develop mechanisms to learn and adapt;]
8. Low Levels of Corruption [Enhance confidence and trust in institutions, which in turn help to create informal institutions, the unwritten rules, customs, traditions, and social norms that shape behavior and interaction within a society that enhances peace.]
For my topic – A Nonviolent Peace for Human Rights – I have told you that the mood for many people in the world is not good.
I have said that drawing from the Judeo Christian ethic, the model for reversing that mood is love and nonviolence.
I have suggested that the real movement that supports and advances change is a spiritual movement – a change of mind, heart, and feet.
And I have proposed as methodology the embracing of realized participatory democracy and humanistic education, make a career of humanity.
As I close, I have two more “Ms” for you: metaphysics and mission.
I said at the beginning of my talk that I was calling for a new generation of humanitarians to promote a nonviolent peace as the integrity of right relations toward co-creating the sustainable Beloved Global nonviolent Community.
As many of you may know, I am not the first person affiliated with Morehouse College to call this institution to be a positive force for peace.
In 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. wrote: “We must find new ways to speak for peace…for justice throughout the developing world, a world that borders on our doorsteps. [Brigham Young University, like all colleges and universities, is also the developing world.] If we do not act, we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark, and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.” – “Conscience and the Vietnam War,” The Trumpet of Conscience, 1968
To MISSION
Today, I call on you to join me on a mission for peace – to be active doers of peace work and to be visible and vocal supporters of people, groups and institutions that work for justice and peace around the globe.
One such institution is the United Nations. This week, the UN office of human rights reported that because the U.S. government has cut billions of dollars in foreign aid, the UN Office has already had to terminate five of its projects.
Brigham Young can show your moral support for the UN by proudly displaying the United Nations flag on campus. Doing so is a way of declaring that you believe world peace is possible – from mood to model to movement to methodology to mission to metaphysics, because you believe in John 3:16, “That God so loved the world….”. God is the really real, the universal Spirit of Love!
In fact, the UN flag teaches a powerful truth we all must learn if we are to be ambassadors of peace, that is: Your agape address ought to be larger than the street you live on.
Picture the UN flag. In the middle is a white design of the world. The continents are visible against a bright blue background. Most people believe that blue background symbolizes the sky. No, it symbolizes the universe.
The little planet we call our world is in the cosmos. We must cease being only global citizens and become cosmic citizens, universal citizens, or we will never responsibly address the issue of global warming or climate disaster. Realize we are losing the only home we have ever had.
If you will [affirm all life] courageously – with dignity and Judeo Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, Islamic, Humanistic agape love – when the history books are written in future generations the historians will have to pause and say: “There lived a great people—a [serious] people who injected new meaning and dignity into the veins of civilization.” This is our challenge and our overwhelming accountability, the lack of which has corroded public respect.
We are thinking, committed citizens at a choice-point – a magic moment of each feeling, thought, circumstance, ever-moving activity of life, and spoken word becoming our greatest vision of humanity – guided by our hearts, powerful transmitters of radiant transformative pure Agape love with no beginning and no end!
That love, which transcends all boundaries and limitations, is the mother of nonviolent peace! The fundamental nature of existence and the truths that underpin the reality of the universe, are a metaphysics of conscious Spirit Love.
I hope each of you will accept the call to be the nonviolent peace for human rights we all wish to see made flesh and walk among us! PEACE!